Junior Orange marches unofficially opened the North's parades season last weekend to little applause or trouble, writes Bryan Coll.
FOR FORTY-FIVE, ear-piercing minutes last Saturday morning, Portadown town centre came to a standstill. By 9am, most available benches, walls and doorsteps were occupied by expectant onlookers, with packed breakfasts gracing most laps. One hairdresser abandoned a client midway through a shampoo to watch the passing spectacle from her shop doorway.
The Junior Orange marches, held in a number of towns across Northern Ireland last weekend, unofficially heralded the beginning of the marching season. In the North, there are few events more hotly contested than Orange parades and few towns more scarred by marching disputes than Portadown.
From the mid-1990s, the Church of the Ascension at Drumcree, situated off the predominantly Catholic Garvaghy Road, became an annual flashpoint for violence. After the newly-formed Parades Commission banned the Orange Order from marching to Drumcree along the Garvaghy Road in 1998, three young brothers, aged 7, 9 and 11, were killed in a sectarian petrol-bomb attack on their home in Ballymoney.
Drumcree soon came to symbolise the North's sectarian divisions in their rawest, most hate-filled form.
Last Saturday's Junior Orange parade in Portadown, however, passed off without incident, thanks in part to the police escorts which book-ended the three participating bands and, more importantly, to its non-contentious route.
The marchers' route, as approved by the Parades Commission, gave the Garvaghy Road a wide berth. "There has been much less trouble at marches in the past few years," says Darryl Hewitt, District Master of the Portadown Orange Lodge. "And we hope it will stay like that". Yet, despite the relaxed, festive atmosphere of Saturday's parade, some local Orangemen remain wholly dissatisfied with their status in Portadown.
The route walked by the 20-strong group of protesters at Drumcree last Sunday morning must be the shortest Orange march in the North. It's a walk that the participants know off by heart. After donning their sashes outside the church, 25 Orangemen and one Orangewoman proceed down the gentle incline alongside the church graveyard, chatting amiably.
As is the case every week, the group comes to a halt at the foot of the hill, in front of a PSNI sergeant and colleague. Here, David Jones, the district secretary of the Portadown Orange Lodge, requests permission to proceed on to the Garvaghy Road.
True to the script, the good-humoured sergeant politely refuses. A pastor then reads an excerpt from Psalm 119("I will walk at liberty because I seek thy precepts") before saying a prayer. The group then ascends the hill, sings God Save The Queenand quickly disperses.
It's a well-oiled routine that the Orangemen have followed every Sunday since 1998, except for a two-week interruption caused by the foot-and-mouth outbreak. "We will remain on protest until the matter of the Garvaghy Road is resolved," says David Jones. "This is to let the Parades Commission and the residents know that we haven't given up".
As well as the Sunday protest, the Orangemen have set up a small café on the brow of the hill which houses members wishing to protest on weekday evenings.
Above the door of the café are the words of Martin Luther, in large red and blue letters: "Here we stand, we can do no other".
Despite little evidence of the Parades Commission moving to lift the 10-year ban on the Garvaghy Road route, the protesters at Drumcree remain confident that their weekly protests will eventually bear fruit.
"I think there will be a resolution," says District Master Darryl Hewitt. For Hewitt, a business studies and ICT teacher at a local secondary school, restoring at least part of the route would send a reassuring signal to unionists perturbed by the new political partnerships formed under power-sharing.
"The whole political situation in Northern Ireland has changed," he says. "A lot of people here would be sceptical about how people have turned and gone into government while issues are still outstanding. (Drumcree) is still a big issue in the unionist community."
For Breandan Mac Cionnaith, long-term spokesman of the Garvaghy Road Residents' Association, Drumcree needs little resolving. "You have reached the point in Portadown where there is a peaceful equilibrium," he says. "For 99 per cent of people in the North, Drumcree belongs in the past. The Catholic community in Portadown has moved on as well. Our lives don't revolve around Orange marches any more."
But as Drumcree slowly drops off the political radar in the North the picturesque Church of the Ascension will continue as the backdrop to Orange protests. "We have seen absolutely no change on this road," says Darryl Hewitt. "If it takes another 10 years, we'll still be here."