Drumcree parade highlights divide in Northern Ireland

The email dropped into my inbox at 2:19pm a week last Friday - 25 September.

"The Parades Commission has today issued a determination in relation to a public procession notified to take place in Portadown on Sunday 27 September."

So convinced were journalists that the Drumcree parade would be banned - just as it had been 1,476 times over the last 28 years - that many were in Newry for a court case.

It was a pre-sentence hearing on former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson, who has been convicted of a rape and sex offences against two schoolgirls.

You could see the ripple of disbelief move through the knots of reporters as they read the determination on the street outside.

The parade was going ahead.

It had been reduced in size, the time had been changed, other restrictions had been applied, but it was on.

With a touch of the naivety that has accompanied the Parades Commission's handling of all this, it added: "The determination should not be seen as a victory for one side or another."

It was a forlorn hope.

We’d gotten to this point because the commission had been caught out in a sloppy process.

They’d already banned the parade, which usually takes place in early July.

But a judicial review of the decision-making process found flaws.

The commission folded in the face of the challenge, the judge quashed the determination and a fresh application was made by Portadown District.

The application had been made on 3 September.

The determination was issued on 25 September, two days before the parade was scheduled to proceed.

The outcome catapulted everyone into the courts as the Garvaghy Road residents mounted a legal action to stop it.

Both parties attended Belfast High Court on the Saturday morning.

A large crowd of supporters accompanied the residents.

The Orange Order came with DUP politicians Carla Lockhart and Diane Dodds and their legal adviser, erstwhile loyalist blogger and flag protester Jamie Bryson.

He has recently written a book called Culture War.

The sub-heading is "Unionism: Thirty Years Under Siege. The Fightback Begins."

I heard cries of "shame on you" directed at Mr Bryson, who the crowd hold responsible for resurrecting this parading dispute.

He later said he’d been threatened and the female elected representatives verbally abused.

The case finally got under way around midday Saturday, 20 hours before the parade was due to start at 8am on Sunday.

It ended at 2:18am on Sunday morning after a marathon legal session involving three separate hearings, two in the High Court and one in the Court of Appeal.

Judge Patricia Smyth gave the parties every opportunity to reach a compromise as the clock ticked down.

She talked about "the abyss" society was looking into and urged them to be "big enough to step back".

The case swung first in favour of the residents, then the Orange Order.

In the final hearing, Mr Justice Michael Humphreys ruled the Parades Commission had taken the necessary advice and attempted to balance the competing rights of Portadown District to freedom of assembly, with the residents’ rights to a private life.

As the statutory body for dealing with parades, it had taken a decision with which, Judge Humphreys accepted, many would vehemently disagree.

But it had been properly reached and the court was not prepared to interfere with it, he said.

The Orangemen of Portadown District had won.

Many Garvaghy residents had left when the court had first granted them a temporary injunction on the parade.

They were asleep when the Court of Appeal overturned that.

They were woken up with the news that a final High Court hearing had not stopped the parade - due in a couple of hours.

The reaction was immediate, people started streaming out of their homes and onto the Garvaghy Road.

By the time we got there, straight from Belfast High Court, the place was packed.

There were large groups at three different points on the long downhill that goes past hundreds of homes.

The atmosphere was tense with intermittent cries of "they’re coming".

The crowd was being marshalled by people with some strategic nous.

At one point, they were told to move back to a point where they were bounded on one side by a high wall and on the other by a steep bank.

That would make it harder for the PSNI to encircle them when they did arrive, they were told.

The crowd thought about this for a moment and duly moved back.

All shades of republicanism and nationalism had turned up.

I saw dissident republicans, senior republicans from Belfast, many Sinn Féin politicians, members of the SDLP and independents.

By 3am, the Sinn Féin leadership team of Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill were there.

A counter-protest had been notified to the Parades Commission in the middle of the night, it had been withdrawn when the legal process seemed to be going in the residents’ favour.

It had not been re-notified - there wasn’t time.

This was now an illegal protest under the legislation.

People didn’t care.

Arms were linked, the road was blocked and the police were left with little choice.

The parade of 35 Orangemen - no supporters and no band - could not pass.

PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher later told the Northern Ireland Policing Board that he wished to facilitate a legal parade, but was not prepared to do it at any cost.

He said he was not prepared to bring the Orangemen, some of them elderly, through "a hostile crowd" with the potential for wider "catastrophic" consequences for Northern Ireland.

I was there the last time the Orange Order walked the Garvaghy Road in 1997, the year before it was banned for what would be almost three decades.

The dispute in the 90s was a bitter one, marked by serious disorder.

People paid with their lives as loyalists used violence in an attempt to force the argument.

The dead included a taxi driver Michael McGoldrick and a council worker Adrian Lamph, both shot dead.

Robert Hamill was badly beaten in the town and died later in hospital.

Darren Murray was 12, when he was knocked down and killed as he was chased near an interface.

Bernadette Martin was 18 when she was shot dead in the home of her Protestant boyfriend.

An RUC officer, Frank O’ Reilly, died of injuries caused by a blast bomb during loyalist rioting.

A Protestant woman Elizabeth O’Neill married to a Catholic was killed by a pipe bomb in her own home.

Solicitor Rosemary Nelson, who’d represented the Garvaghy Road residents, was killed by an undercar booby trap.

All those murders happened in and around Portadown.

Others died elsewhere.

Three young brothers Jason, Mark and Richard Quinn died in Ballymoney when their home was petrol bombed at the height of the 1998 dispute after the parade was banned.

Their murders effectively ended the stand-off and any chance of a parade for almost 30 years.

The killings are what makes the Drumcree parade so visceral for Garvaghy Road residents.

It’s why - to them - it doesn’t matter whether it’s one Orangeman or the entire district that wants to walk the road.

It smacks of sectarianism, triumphalism and coat-trailing.

They believe it is part of a wider campaign to reinstate the parade permanently.

For Portadown District, it's bound up in tradition and history and the desire to walk a route that their forebears have done since 1807.

They’d walked to police lines every Sunday for 28 years.

For them, this was unfinished business.

They point to the involvement of senior republicans in the protest and that the rule of law is not being respected.

In the 90s, the argument was had on the streets, this time it played out in the courts.

We’ll return there tomorrow for the latest instalment.

The residents’ challenge will rest on whether the Parades Commission determination was based on the totality of what the PSNI told them could happen if the parade were to be approved.

A result in favour of the residents will end the stand-off.

Portadown District has said it will abide by the law and use it to further challenge any decision it disagrees with.

A result in favour of the Orange Order will create a very real problem given the trenchant opposition on the Garvaghy Road to any form of parade.

As we saw from the unsuccessful mediation process run by Northern Secretary Chris Bryant, there's little appetite for compromise.

All this week has shown is that even three decades after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement – in places that suffered most - there is a very thin veneer on the peace.