‘The Executive has agreed a joint statement calling for all parades and related protests to remain lawful. This must include the acceptance of the lawful decisions of the Parades’ Commission’. John O’Dowd in 2014.
‘We have all, thankfully, signed up to the justice system, to policing and to the rule of law.’ Colum Eastwood in July 2014.
‘I am calling on all political leaders to call for an end to any illegal protests’. Caoimhe Archibald, May 2021.
Sound principles for an inclusive, tolerant, Northern Ireland. This autumn would have been an excellent opportunity to apply them.
For centuries parading has been contentious in Ulster. The Orange Order itself emerged from the Battle of the Diamond in County Armagh in 1795, when Protestant ‘Peep o’ Day Boys’ defeated Catholic ‘Defenders’. The Order dissolved and reconstituted itself following 1823 legislation against unlawful oaths; was proscribed along with the Catholic Association in 1825; and dissolved itself under pressure from the state in 1836. Orange processions faced periods of statutory restriction (1832–45 and 1850–72). With the establishment of Northern Ireland in 1921, Orange parades acquired the backing of a Unionist state, gaining a freedom of movement it had not enjoyed before – and routinely denied to nationalists.
Needless to say, the outbreak of the Troubles exacerbated – and hardened – opposition to Orangemen marching wherever they felt entitled to do so. One of the most contentious parades became the Order’s return procession from a church service the Sunday before the Twelfth in Drumcree, County Armagh, along the Catholic and nationalist Garvaghy Road.
In July 1995, the RUC stopped the procession, provoking a two-day stand-off and loyalist violence across Northern Ireland. Mediation secured a silent procession without bands, while nationalist protesters stood aside. The subsequent spectacle of David Trimble and Ian Paisley clasping raised hands in Portadown looked like triumphalism to residents who believed they had compromised.
The following year, the police initially blocked the parade, then reversed their decision after widespread loyalist disorder. Nationalist fury followed. Policing had become inseparable from deciding whose demands would prevail, with each confrontation reinforcing the suspicion that sufficient pressure could overturn a decision.
The Parades Commission was intended to break that cycle. Established in 1997, it separated adjudication from enforcement: the Commission would determine restrictions; the police would uphold them. In July 1998, it barred the return procession along the Garvaghy Road. Loyalist roadblocks, attacks, and violence followed. On the Twelfth, Richard, Mark, and Jason Quinn were murdered when loyalists petrol-bombed their Ballymoney home. Their deaths helped drain support from the confrontation. For nearly 30 years the parade remained banned.
This explains residents’ anxieties. It also explains why an independent process matters. Neither inherited tradition nor inherited trauma can confer an unlimited right to determine who uses a public road.
This year’s re-opening of the wound began with a successful legal challenge. The High Court quashed the Parades Commission’s ban because not all commissioners had approved its final text. The fragile political settlement in Northern Ireland is unravelling because of an administrative failure.
A fresh application followed, and on 25th September the Commission authorised a heavily restricted procession: 35 Orangemen, at eight o’clock in the morning, without bands or accompanying supporters. The Court of Appeal subsequently rejected the residents’ appeal against the decision.
Yet the procession never happened. Protesters blocked the road – with Sinn Féin First Minister Michelle O’Neill among the politicians joining them. Secretary of State Chris Bryant himself described the obstruction in Parliament as an unlawful, unnotified protest. The Orange Order had followed the process, secured permission, and that permission survived legal challenges. Their opponents – supported by leading politicians – achieved through threats of unrest what they had failed to obtain legally.
After nearly a fortnight, as is within his power, Bryant prohibited the procession. Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Chief Constable Jon Boutcher advised that facilitating it required an intervention carrying unacceptable risks of injury, disorder, and wider unrest. The Commission also considered that its original determination no longer had legal effect.
Bryant praised the Orangemen’s commitment to the law and co-operation with police, then ensured that their lawful procession could not proceed. The Labour Government has thereby undermined the rule of law by demonstrating that it can easily be defeated by disorder. The message is clear: lose in court, block the road, and the Government will deliver the victory the law denied you.
The ban’s legality is being challenged, and the courts will decide that question. The political indictment does not depend on anticipating their judgment. In 1998, a Labour government maintained the restriction despite loyalist violence. In 2026, another Labour government has prohibited a legal procession after nationalist obstruction. The law now bends to whoever threatens the most trouble.
Nationalist politicians cannot escape their share of responsibility. Michelle O’Neill’s participation makes her claim to be ‘First Minister for all’ illusory. The PSNI have invited her to a voluntary interview under caution over the protests. Finance Minister John O’Dowd and Economy Minister Caoimhe Archibald, whose previous exhortations opened this article, were among four Sinn Féin ministers (the other being Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins) who faced Assembly motions to remove them with a 12 month ban on holding ministerial office. All four failed: cross-community support was required, and no nationalist MLA voted for removal. Ministers accused of undermining the law relied on communal solidarity to protect their positions.
SDLP MP Colum Eastwood, meanwhile, visited the Garvaghy Road on 9th October and told those receiving police interview letters ‘not to worry’. Eastwood’s reassurance sits rather awkwardly with his earlier insistence that everyone had signed up to policing and the rule of law.
The damage extends into unionism. DUP Deputy Leader Carla Lockhart has called for O’Neill’s removal, while DUP Leader Gavin Robinson has resisted increasing demands to collapse the Assembly. That leaves the DUP defending participation in government alongside Sinn Féin, while trying to persuade angry supporters that constitutional methods still deliver. Lack of repercussions for nationalist and republican politicians strengthens those arguing that restraint merely guarantees defeat.
The wider parading settlement is already fraying. The Young Citizen Volunteers Flute Band announced that it would stop engaging with police and the Parades Commission, and an unnotified parade along the Protestant Shankill Road followed. The Orange Order has instructed members in Belfast to cease all engagement with the PSNI. Nationalist residents’ groups from other former flashpoints have warned that Drumcree 2.0 threatens the delicate agreements elsewhere.
The lesson of the 1990s was supposed to be that neither community could secure its demands by threatening disorder. Today, Orangemen obeyed the law and were stopped; their opponents blocked the road and got what they wanted.
O’Dowd, Archibald, and Eastwood were right when they insisted that lawful decisions must be respected. Their failure to apply their own stated principles now leaves unionists – and others – asking why they should accept restrictions that nationalists won’t – and can defeat easily. That question will outlast this dispute.
The Labour Government has weakened the independent body responsible for regulating contentious parades across Northern Ireland and rewarded the agitation it was created to contain. Northern Ireland has spent decades taking parading disputes off the streets. With a stroke of his pen, Bryant has put them back there.