Sir, - As a keen supporter of the stand taken by the Portadown Orangemen following the Drumcree service, I was saddened by the sequence of unfortunate events which inevitably took the steam out of the protest which the brethren always wished to be peaceful. No one is in any doubt that they were standing up for their basic civil right to walk the Queen's highway, along a stretch of road the Garvaghy residents are claiming as "theirs" - and they have continued to flaunt dozens of highly provocative foreign flags there to prove it.
Nationalists would obviously wish to castigate the Portadown brethren for encouraging large numbers of fellow Orangemen to support them in their protest which sadly got out of control. How were they to know that so many so-called "loyalist" hoodlums, hell-bent on smuggling in guns, bombs and fireworks to resist the security forces, would infiltrate the stand-off? In my opinion this might have been avoided had some of the soldiers and RUC officers manning the gigantic military barriers on the road and in the fields (to overwhelm the brethren) been placed at a number of security checkpoints to search vehicles and identify troublemakers on their way to Drumcree.
When Rev William Bingham made his plea to the Orangemen to come down from the hill, following the tragic deaths of the three children, I felt that his well-publicised statement was rather premature as I believed this might be interpreted by some as an admission of responsibility, however remote, by the Portadown Orangemen - which of course is completely untrue.
On reflection, I feel that the Armagh chaplain was right to express his personal point of view. I believe that the Portadown officers could have maintained the high moral ground had they instructed their fellow brethren to remove themselves the day after the first night of violence against the security forces. They could easily have returned with a token protest as in fact they have done following the security search of the field. All this might have prevented the indiscriminate use of plastic bullets, the injuries sustained by policemen and loyalists alike, the burning of property and the deaths of the Ballymoney children.
May I make two final comments on the events we have been witnessing since "Drumcree Sunday"? First, I resent the continuing implication by government ministers and politicians from both communities that the stand-off was an anti-Agreement backlash. Orangemen and their genuine supporters were not trying to obtain at the barricades what they could not achieve at the ballot box - the view of the new SDLP Deputy First Minister, who, incidentally, still refers to this part of the United Kingdom as "the North of Ireland" (nine times, in fact, in a recent UTV interview)! Actually, Orangemen who voted for the Agreement were as thick on the ground as those who voted against it.
Secondly, moderate thinking loyal citizens of the province were simply appalled at the extremely provocative military installations set up at Drumcree - reminiscent of a security barrier at a border checkpoint or a war zone in northern France in 1916. Little wonder the blood of loyal Orange brethren was up and they were determined to show their gross resentment of them. It goes without saying that had successive British governments shown the same determined initiative to defeat militant republican terrorism over the past 30 years, there would have been no need for a stand-off at Drumcree or, for that matter, in any other town or village in Northern Ireland. - Yours, etc., Wilfred Breen (Tyrone County Lay Chaplain),
Hospital Road,
Omagh,
Co Tyrone.