Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Bryant rejected furious accusations from the U.K. region’s unionists Monday that he had “bent the knee” to Irish republicans blocking a long-disputed Protestant march. Bryant told the House of Commons that his decision to ban what had been a legally authorized parade by the Orange Order — a pro-British Protestant brotherhood reviled by many of Northern Ireland’s Catholics — had been taken principally to avoid violence. Thousands led by Sinn Fein, the main Irish republican party, had spent nearly two weeks blocking the Orangemen’s intended path down the Garvaghy Road, the main Catholic district in the town of Portadown, but police kept the two sides apart.
Upholding the law also means judiciously preventing serious disorder,” Bryant said in defense of his intervention Friday night. Democratic Unionist leader Gavin Robinson accused Bryant of bowing to a threat of violence from Irish Republican Army militants who featured prominently within the Garvaghy Road crowd. Most IRA members have observed a cease-fire since 1997 and officially disarmed in 2005, but several small factions still plot occasional bomb and gun attacks.
Robinson said Northern Ireland’s unionists “know that this British government has bent the knee to them.” But Bryant said his decision to bar the Orangemen — despite a decision last month by the region’s independent Parades Commission to permit a heavily restricted march by 35 Orangemen — had so far kept violence at bay. The truth is, things have actually passed remarkably peacefully,” he said, adding: “I don’t think anybody seriously proposed that the police should drag people off the street.” He spoke hours after two courts in Northern Ireland tangled with the conflict of rights stirred up by the revival of the Orange marching demands in Portadown, a sectarian dispute that triggered bloodshed and rioting across Northern Ireland in the mid-1990s. The Court of Appeal, overseen by Northern Ireland’s highest judge, rejected a lawsuit by the Garvaghy Road protesters seeking to challenge the original Parades Commission ruling.
Orange supporters said this judgment kept the door open for an eventual parade down Garvaghy Road for the first time since 1997, when police backed by British soldiers forced the parade through with the use of armored vehicles and volleys of plastic bullets. A separate Belfast High Court hearing gave the go-ahead for Portadown’s Orange lodge to pursue a legal challenge against both Bryant and Northern Ireland’s police commander, Chief Constable Jon Boutcher. That case will be heard starting next Monday.
Boutcher, rejecting unionist calls for him to resign, issued his own lengthy defense of his officers’ management of the Portadown standoff. He appealed to both sides to respect a legal process that could take months to conclude — including potential charges against senior Sinn Féin figures involved in the Garvaghy Road blockade. The legal fight over whose rights should prevail is fracturing Northern Ireland’s cross-community government, a bitterness on full display Monday night at Stormont, the center of government on a hill overlooking Belfast.
After a three-hour debate in the Northern Ireland Assembly, unionist members voted unanimously to oust the four Sinn Féin ministers from their supposed unity government. Unionists accused all four, led by First Minister Michelle O’Neill, of breaking their ministerial pledge to uphold the law of the land by joining and encouraging the Garvaghy Road protests. O’Neill accused her accusers on the other side of the chamber of being reactionary bigots.
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