Orange Order Rejects Drumcree Deal Days Before Sunday's Parade
Talks to settle the Drumcree dispute are on a knife-edge after the Orange Order rejected a resolution document drawn up by the Northern Ireland Secretary. The Garvaghy Road residents indicated they would accept it if the Order did. The DUP MP Carla Lockhart told a rally in Portadown that the document was “not acceptable”. The parade is due on Sunday.
The asymmetry is the whole difficulty: one side has said yes-if, the other has said never. Jamie Bryson, legal adviser to the Portadown district, said it “will not surrender the fundamental principle, not now, not last week, not next week, not ever”. Breandán Mac Cionnaith, for the residents, emerged from seven hours of talks at Hillsborough Castle saying that “if it’s accepted by the Orange Order, it will be accepted by us”. Sir Chris Bryant called a resolution “tantalisingly close” and appealed to everyone to “search deep in their souls for another chunk of compromise”. The district master Nigel Dawson said there are “currently no proposals on the table” and that the Order’s position is simply that the law be applied. Underneath it sits a constitutional problem rather than a public-order one: the Parades Commission’s authority, which held this dispute for twenty-eight years, has been displaced by the courts, and nobody has agreed what replaces it. Watch the Court of Appeal hearing listed for Friday.