Drumcree Appeal Fails as Stormont Debates Confidence
The Court of Appeal refused Garvaghy Road residents permission to challenge the determination allowing the Drumcree parade, saying the application had “no reasonable prospect of success”. It changes nothing on the ground: the march was banned on Friday. Meanwhile unionist parties forced a no-confidence debate on Michelle O’Neill and three Sinn Féin ministers.
The Lady Chief Justice, Dame Siobhan Keegan, found the Parades Commission had properly handled the police assessment of disorder risk and given adequate reasons, and stressed the court was ruling only on lawfulness, not on whether the march should happen. The residents’ spokesman Breandán Mac Cionnaith called the outcome “very academic” since the ban already stands; the loyalist activist Jamie Bryson said the lawbreakers had been defeated and promised a challenge to the ban next week. That challenge was itself delayed after the chief constable was added to the case. At Stormont the motion, proposed by the Traditional Unionist Voice member Timothy Gaston and backed by the Democratic Unionists and Ulster Unionists, cannot remove anyone: without cross-community support it has no binding force, and it will fail. Ms O’Neill called it “performative” and “all for the optics”, adding that “when the law is wrong I will stand firmly against it”. Police are running a large-scale criminal inquiry into the protests.