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# Garvaghy Road Residents Reject Mediator As Parades Commission Weighs Drumcree Application
- URL: https://aontachtmedia.ie/garvaghy-road-residents-reject-mediator-as-parades-commission-weighs-drumcree-application/
- Published: 2026-09-23T11:26:40.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-23T11:26:40.000Z
- Description: The threats are widely seen as hollow. The Orange Institutions and the machine of loyalist paramilitarism it could once call upon to support its claims are today a shadow of their former selves.
- Author: Editor
- Tags: News

The Parades Commission is expected to rule on an application by the Orange Order to march down the Garvaghy Road in Portadown this Sunday, with nationalist residents warning that deals reached on contentious parades elsewhere could "unravel" if the parade is forced through.

The application for a march of 60 Orange Order members was made after a decision on the parade was quashed in Belfast by the High Court. The Parades Commission conceded a procedural error in how it handled the annual application and appointed a mediator. Residents earlier yesterday however ruled out participation in the proposed new talks. Breandán Mac Cionnaith of the Garvaghy Road Residents' Coalition said the proposed candidate, TIDES Mediation NI, a Belfast-based non-profit, had previously worked for the Orange Order, a conflict of interest that should have been declared.

"How can you expect a mediation organisation that has done work with the Orange Order to be classed as completely independent?" he asked. Any future mediator, Mac Cionnaith added, must have international standing and "knowledge of conflicting cultures and traditions". Following a meeting with the Commission on Tuesday, which Mac Cionnaith described as "fairly positive", he condemned the appointment process as "flawed".

Meanwhile eleven nationalist residents' groups from across the six counties have issued a joint statement warning that accommodations reached in their own areas could be undone by the reopening of the Portadown dispute. Among the signatories are the Lower Ormeau Concerned Community, the Crumlin and Ardoyne Residents' Association, the Springfield Residents' Action Group and the Short Strand Residents' Association.

The joint statement said: "Our concern is that such accommodation could unravel if the Orange Order continue to insist on parading down Garvaghy Road, or indeed pursue the same demands in other Nationalist/Catholic areas." It pledged "full support and solidarity with the residents of Garvaghy Road, in their determination to be free from unwanted and intimidatory Orange Order parades through their area."

**The long shadow of Drumcree**

This week's events are only the latest chapter in a conflict that stretches back well over a century to the 1870s. As the modern conflict intensified in the 1970s and 1980s, the dispute returned to prominence and led to serious violence centered on Obins Street in Portadown in 1986\. Each July from 1995 to 2000, the parade sparked major protests and violence in the Garvaghy Road area, drawing international attention. 

During those years the dispute was directly linked to a number of murders by loyalist paramilitaries, including those of Michael McGoldrick, solicitor Rosemary Nelson and the three Quinn children, aged nine, ten and eleven, killed in a UVF firebomb attack on their home in Ballymoney in July 1998, during loyalist violence linked to the stand-off.

In contrast to the end of the last century, the only element that is new about the current marching demand is the weakness of the forces making it. Representatives of the Portadown Orange Lodge and their supporters have spent the week gravitating between, on the one hand, calls for mediation, and on the other threats that they are not, in fact, asking anyone's permission at all. But the threats are widely seen as hollow. The Orange Institutions and the machine of loyalist paramilitarism it could once call upon to support its claims are today a shadow of their former selves. Once capable of mobilising tens of thousands onto the streets and bringing society to a standstill, their modern form brings to mind Marx's observation that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce.

It appears unlikely that the British state will elect to upset the new material conditions and political arrangements of the post-Troubles six counties on behalf of a group that is increasingly marginal, and that has demonstrated time and again over the past decade that it is incapable of mobilising support. The Parades Commission will decide this week, but whatever it decides, the residents of the Garvaghy Road have made clear that they will not be abandoning the freedom from sectarian marches they have won since those summers in the 1990s, and that the organisation now demanding the right to march through their area has long since lost the strength to take it.