Portadown, Northern Ireland – When the summer holidays arrived, Chris Nelson worried about his mother. At night, he lay awake waiting for her to return. During the day, he rang family members to ask if she was safe.
There were threats and letters through the door. His mother, Rosemary Nelson, was a lawyer representing the Catholic residents opposing the Protestant Orange Order parade along Portadown’s Garvaghy Road in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s. Every July, as marching season approached, there was a standoff.
Orangemen sought to return from Drumcree church along what they regarded as their traditional route. Residents opposed the passage of the anti-Catholic organisation through a majority Catholic street. In some years, police forced the parade through.
In later years, it was blocked. Rosemary would spend summer evenings alongside the residents on Garvaghy Road. Before leaving home each evening, she told her son that she was going to look after families and make sure their children were okay.
She compared them to his friends at primary school. When work allowed, the family went to Bundoran, across the border, and for a day the fear would pass. But one night, during a standoff in 1997 when the state police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), used batons to clear Catholic locals from the road, “she was beaten by the police”, said Chris.
I was always thinking something was going to happen to my mum.” On a Monday in March 1999, nearly a year after the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to the conflict, Rosemary drove away from her home in Lurgan. As she braked at a nearby junction, a bomb beneath her car exploded. Her eight-year-old daughter, Sarah, was at primary school nearby and heard the blast.
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