AIA Stand In Solidarity With Ormeau Road Residents
AIA “will be ready to stand with residents in resisting any attempt to impose this sectarian parade through their community,” just as they had done for the Garvaghy Road.
Soon after the British Secretary of State barred the Orange Order from marching down the Garvaghy Road in early October, another Loyalist fraternity – the Belfast Walker Club branch of the Apprentice Boys of Derry – lodged application PAR\112107 with the Parades Commission, seeking Crown approval to march down Belfast’s Lower Ormeau Road.
Anti-Imperialist Action (AIA) is the first Socialist Republican organisation to avow solidarity with the people of Lower Ormeau following the news, declaring that they “will be ready to stand with… residents in resisting any attempt to impose this sectarian parade through their community,” just as they had done for the Garvaghy Road.
The Lower Ormeau Road is the part of the Ormeau Road north of the River Lagan, and is Nationalist in character. The community was last subject to deadly Loyalist violence in February 1992, when paramilitants murdered five civilians at the local Sean Graham bookmaker’s.
Residents have been repeatedly subject to hostilities since. This includes the arrest of February 2021, when members of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) handcuffed a mourner at the Sean Graham memorial; the events of August 2024, when Loyalists returned in lockstep with ‘Coolock Says No’ campaigners to taunt Nationalist and Muslim residents; and the recent desecration of the Sean Graham memorial on Thursday 15 October.
The Parades Commission is set to make a decision on Wednesday 28 October. If the parade goes ahead as proposed, it will take place on Saturday 7 November and consist of approximately eighty attendees departing from Ballynafeigh Orange Hall at 9:30 am and concluding in the historically Loyalist area of Donegall Pass at 10:00 am.
