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Portadown - Community Solidarity Proves Decisive

03/07/08

Given the Six County Parades Commission’s decision to reroute this year’s Orange Order ‘Drumcree’ march, there is probably no better time to reflect on the history of that march and of how the collective solidarity of Portadown’s nationalist community has again proved the decisive factor.

Portadown has a conspicuous place in the history of unionist militancy.

The Orange Order was founded just outside the town in 1795, an offshoot of a sectarian terrorist group known as the Peep O’Day Boys, named for their practice of attacking catholics at dawn.

The Orange Order soon became a weapon in the British government’s arsenal of war against the United Irishmen. Terrified by the secular vision of an independent Ireland which Ireland’s first republicans presented to the people, Britain used the Order to heighten sectarian enmity, terrorise catholics and fill the ranks of their brutal militias.

Although the Orange Order professed loyalty to the English monarchy, its main activities were “wrecking”, a term for the often fatal attacks on catholics and the wanton destruction of their homes and businesses. This campaign of sectarian violence was so widespread that, in the late 1790s, a British parliamentarian warned of a “general extermination” of catholics in the Portadown area.

After the Order had served its purpose in helping to suppress the United Irish movement, the British parliament tried to ban the protestant vigilantes several times.

Since then, however, the Orange Order has again acquired a degree of respectability in the eyes of the British establishment. Today, many in leadership positions within unionist politics are members of the Orange Order.

In the confusing mix of religion and politics that marks the history of the ‘loyal’ orders, the Church of the Ascension at Drumcree derives its significance from the bloody role it played in the founding ceremonies of the Orange Order.

The first recorded Orange service at Drumcree took place in 1795, following a call by the Reverend George Maunsell, at a Sunday service, when he implored his congregation to “celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne in the true spirit of the institution” by attending a service to be conducted by a Rev Devine.

The historian Francis Plowden described what happened after the Rev Devine’s service in his “History of Ireland”:

“This evangelical labourer in the vineyard of the Lord of Peace so worked up the minds of his audience, that upon retiring from service, on the different roads leading to their respective homes, they gave full scope to the anti-papistical zeal with which he had inspired them, falling upon every Catholic they met, beating and bruising them without distinction, breaking the doors and windows of their houses, and actually murdering two unoffending peasants who were digging in a bog.”

For nearly two centuries after that original Orange service in 1795, the Order marched to Drumcree by way of Obins Street, then the only catholic enclave at the edge of Portadown. Many years, the loyal orders paraded through Obins Street dozens of times each marching season, sometimes several times in the one day.

Murders, beatings, and the “wrecking” of catholic homes and businesses were routine in every decade.

By the early 1970s, catholics lived in a ghetto with two main streets – Obins Street, narrow and old, and Garvaghy Road, a wider and newer thoroughfare – bisecting the eight housing estates where most of the town’s 5,000 catholics now live. Catholics remain a vulnerable minority in Portadown’s overall population of about 28,000.

After Obins Street residents finally succeeded in 1985 and ’86 in moving Orange marches away from their front doors after decades of struggle, the state continued to force marches along Garvaghy Road. It is no small irony that many catholics moved to Garvaghy Road to escape unionist intimidation and violence in other parts of Portadown, only to have this sectarian parade routed through their haven.

Garvaghy Road became the focus for national and international attention in the mid-90s, as the local community struggled to defend their right to live free from sectarian harassment and the torture of the major RUC/British army operations which these annual Orange invasions brought in tow.

The British military operations virtually amounted to the imposition of martial law and curfew upon the Garvaghy community. In July 1997, at least 1,500 members of the RUC and 1,000 British troops were used to subjugate the local community, whose population totals around 5,000 men, women and children. Such was the extent of the military occupation of the area, and the restrictions placed upon the movements of the local community, that local catholics were physically prevented from attending Sunday mass by heavily armed British soldiers and members of the RUC.

Residents who attempted to mount peaceful protests against Orange Order marches were beaten and forcibly removed.

In Portadown, catholics, nationalists and republicans only feel secure within their own areas. Over the years, many have been murdered by pro-British death-squads: Jack McCabe, Felix Hughes, Eamon McMahon, Joey Weir, Thomas Trainor, Dennis Kelly, Martin McConville, Robert Hamill, and Adrian Lamph are all catholics who have died horrific deaths at the hands of unionists within the area of the main commercial town centre alone. Many other catholics have been severely assaulted and wounded in the same commercial area while going about their normal everyday activities.

Robert Hamill was murdered by a lynch mob of up to 30 unionists while returning from a night out with two female relatives in April 1997. A major controversy still surrounds his brutal death, as it was revealed that members of the RUC were present when the attack took place but refused to intervene to save his life, or render medical attention in the aftermath, despite the cries and pleas of Robert’s two cousins.

In the 12 months between July 1998, when the Drumcree march finally was halted, and July 1999, the Orange Order conducted a co-ordinated and concentrated campaign of intimidation against Portadown’s nationalist community. Nightly blockades of the area, attacks on homes and individuals, intimidation of catholic shoppers out of the town centre, attacks on school-children, frequent illegal, intimidatory marches and rallies became a constant feature of life.

On March 15, 1999 Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition (GRRC) solicitor Rosemary Nelson, a well known and respected advocate for human rights and civil liberties, was brutally murdered when a bomb was planted under her car. The first woman to set up a law practice in Lurgan, Rosemary Nelson stood for many clients who were victims of the emergency legislated system in the Six Counties. She accompanied the GRRC to meetings with both the Dublin and London governments and in proximity talks with the Orange Order. She had been under death threat from supporters of the Portadown Orange Lodge, and had received death threats and intimidation from the RUC.

Three months later, in June 1999, Elizabeth O’Neill, a 65-year-old grandmother was killed when unionists, one of whom was later identified as an RUC Special Branch agent, threw a bomb into her Portadown home.

One would have expected that, given the extremely violent history behind these marches, more than sufficient grounds existed for the permanent banning of these sectarian displays from nationalist areas of Portadown.

Unfortunately, each year sees new attempts to try and inveigle an Orange march through this long-beleaguered community. And each year this small community has stood firm in its resolve to resist.

It is now 2008, over 200 years since the first of these bigoted, triumphant, violent and intimidating carnivals of reaction, and this year has been no different.

Recognising that once again there were partisan political influences at play and that the Parades Commission may have felt the need to succumb to pressure from certain political quarters and issue a ruling in favour of a march along either Obins Street or the Garvaghy Road, the residents mobilised from within.

The Strategic Review of Parading Body, chaired by ex-British army officer Paddy Ashdown, had, in April, made a public and political link between marches and the devolution of policing and justice powers to the Stormont executive. Recent political talks at Downing Street to resolve outstanding and unresolved political matters also included the marching issue on the agenda.

In parallel to these high wire political discussions, the GRRC have held meetings within the community that will actually be affected by any decision that is made on Orange Order marches in Portadown.

It was the unanimous view of those who attended those meetings that, in order to demonstrate to all those outside political influences that the resolve of the community had in no way diminished through time, a petition should be conducted as a simple non-threatening and non-violent tool for local people to express their views. A further meeting was held to agree the form of words to be used. Those conducting the petition were requested to ensure, as far as possible, that only persons aged 18 or over were asked to sign.

Subsequently, over 2,560 signatures were collected.

To put that figure, which obviously does not include those persons who were not at home on the evenings the petition was conducted, into its proper perspective - it equates to the equivalent of over 85 per cent of the 3,000 persons on the electoral register who reside in the Garvaghy Road/Obins Street area of Portadown. In contrast to the palpable strong feeling around the Orange parades and the petition, the combined vote of Sinn Féin and the SDLP in the last local election was just under 2,000 votes.

The community’s initiative to rely on their own strength proved to be a timely one.

Just three days before the Parades Commission was due to make its decision on this year’s Drumcree march, both the Six County first minister Peter Robinson and his minister for Finance and Personnel, Nigel Dodds met with the Orange Order in Portadown. On the day when the decision was to be announced, it was revealed that the Orange Order had also met with Sinn Féin. Residents await information as to what was discussed at both of these meetings with regard to the issue of sectarian marches through their community.

With over 85 per cent of residents having already signed the community petition, the position of the people of Garvaghy is crystal clear – a position that will have to be respected. Through solidarity with one and other, with Garvaghy neighbour standing firm with Garvaghy neighbour - ordinary men and women, from 18 to 80, have in the past thwarted the mighty and the powerful and will do so again if required.

Soon, the attempts to marginalise and demonise the Garvaghy Road community for standing up for their rights will commence in earnest. The DUP has already publicly deemed the community’s leaders to be “anti-Protestant” and “renegade Republicans”. Soon, the attempts to impose an Orange march through the area at some time in the future will re-commence.

And, if they are to live free from the human rights abuses that these parades constitute, residents will have to remain permanently on their guard against such moves, and rely not on the state, on the British justice system, on parades’ bodies or on political parties, but on their own strength - the same strength that has served them in the past.

The wording of the petition, which the residents signed and presented to the Parades Commission, contains no sense or sentiment of sectarianism or bigotry – just a desire to live free from sectarian harassment. It simply and concisely reflects the feelings of the vast majority of the Garvaghy Road residents and, no doubt, all the communities in the Six Counties who are victimised by the relentless will of the Orange Order and its bedfellows in the British establishment to humiliate the Irish people, and stamp the mark of empire upon their communities.

Therefore, it is only right that the collective words of those ordinary women and men seeking justice and peace for themselves and their children should form the final paragraph of this article:

“Since 1998, and particularly from the start of this millennium, the rerouting of contentious marches away from the Garvaghy Road and Obins Street by the Parades Commission has meant that our community – and the wider community – has enjoyed successive peaceful summers. The clouds of humiliation and fear, tension and violence, and the physical sieges of our community that accompanied those sectarian marches, have also disappeared. Residents in our neighbourhoods now enjoy family and community life in relative peace and tranquillity. Our community has “moved on” – others need to do likewise. A less contentious alternative route to accommodate such marches exists along the Corcrain and Dungannon Roads. Insistence by some that only an Orange march along the Garvaghy Road can form a resolution to this age-old dispute demonstrates a complete disregard for the views of those who would be most directly affected – residents and our families.”

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