Talks aimed at resolving the Drumcree parade dispute have broken up without agreement, with the Northern Ireland secretary, Chris Bryant, describing the situation as being between a “rock and a hard place”. Speaking on Thursday night after the latest talks with the Orange Order and residents of Garvaghy Road broke up, Bryant said: “I think this is the end of these conversations. We haven’t come to a settled agreement, and it’s a shame, but my door remains open.” Last Friday’s Parades Commission decision to grant the Orange Order the right to hold a procession down the nationalist Garvaghy Road plunged Northern Ireland into one of its most perilous periods since the 1998 peace deal.
A legal appeal by the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition originally scheduled for Friday has been pushed back to Monday to facilitate any further talks. This would have been on condition the Orange Order would never apply for permit for that parade route again. Breandán Mac Cionnaith, of the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition said “the reality is” there was “no such thing as half a march”.
Jamie Bryson, a legal adviser to the Orange Order, who earlier this week said he would “not surrender” said he would accept Monday’s ruling. If we lose, we’ll accept that.” The dispute began last week after the march along the mainly nationalist Garvaghy Road was given the go-ahead by the Parades Commission for the first time since 1998, a decision denounced by Sinn Féin as “madness” and by the taoiseach as “incomprehensible and wrong”. The dispute, which threatened to collapse Stormont and has returned Northern Ireland to bleak days of the past, has also revived the interest of key US Democrats.
Richie Neal, the US representative for Massachussetts’ 1st congressional district, described the parade as “needlessly provocative”. The Congressional Friends of Ireland Caucus, which Neal sits on, wrote to Bryant urging him to use his powers to reverse the Parades Commission decision. Twenty-eight years have passed since the signing of the Good Friday agreement, and a generation has grown without a single memory of the Troubles,” the lawmakers wrote.
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