Orangemen double Drumcree protests
PORTADOWN Orangemen voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday night to double their weekly Drumcree protests, adding a midweek event to the current Sunday morning protests.
It will raise the stakes for this year’s Drumcree Sunday, with Portadown District officers refusing to say whether it will take place on Sunday July 3 or July 10, but the Portadown Times understand that the 10th is the more likely date.
Officers are also refusing to lodge the controversial One-Bar-11 form for permission to walk on Drumcree Sunday, which in law requires 28 days notice. No form has so far been lodged with police, with the deadline passed, although a blind eye was turned last year when they lodged it just a week before the march.
The same cat-and-mouse game is being played this year, and it looks as if no form will be sent in this time, although the authorities are again likely to turn a blind eye to avoid confrontation.
“You’ll just have to wait and see,” said District Master Darryl Hewitt after Wednesday’s meeting. He also refused to comment when the first Wednesday night protest would take place, although it is likely to be July 20 after the Twelfth is out of the way – this year’s County Armagh demonstration is in Killylea.
Meanwhile, Mr Hewitt and two Portadown Orange officers met with two members of the NI Parades Commission on Monday night at the Seagoe Hotel to try and move the Drumcree issue forward – a meeting which Mr Hewitt described as “frustrating” and the commission viewed as “constructive”.
“Obviously they were new commissioners and understood little about Drumcree, asking what the parade was all about and why we wanted to walk the Garvaghy Road,” said Mr Hewitt. “We told them the Orange Order had been walking the route since 1805 and that we simply wanted to continue the tradition and our civil rights. We also said we wanted to follow the current desire of shared space and a shared future.”
He added that the most important part of the meeting was the District’s call for face-to-face talk with the Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition, “without preconditions” to discuss the issue – talks which the GRRC had refused, “and which the commission has done little to accommodate”.
A spokesman for the commission said, “The meeting was constructive and we promised we would continue to seek to establish comprehensive dialogue between all the stakeholders with a view to a resolution.”
The GRRC, though, is refusing to talk, and chairman Joe Duffy insisted, “It’s a dead duck, and as far as we are concerned the issue is resolved and has been since the return parade was banned in 1998. All the Orange Order wants to do is talk about the return parade through the Garvaghy Road, but there are other major issues like the Orange Arch at Parkmount, the Junior Orange parade and bonfire, plus other social issues. We’ve simply lost interest and have moved on.”
