At eight o’clock on Sunday morning, 35 members of the Orange Order were due to set off down the Garvaghy Road in Portadown, a mainly nationalist street that no Orange parade has been permitted to walk since the late 1990s. Al Jazeera and the Guardian put the gap at 28 years; RTÉ’s account at one point said 30. Either way, getting those 35 men onto that road required the Parades Commission, three separate courts and roughly 13 hours of legal argument, most of it conducted while the town, and large parts of the legal profession, would normally have been asleep.
The institution at the centre of it all is the Parades Commission, the body Parliament set up to own exactly this category of decision — to be the place where marching disputes get decided, so that the alternative isn’t. On Friday it reversed its long-running determination and said the Portadown parade could go ahead, subject to restrictions: an 8am start and a cap of 35 participants, but, pointedly, no restrictions on the route. Unionist parties welcomed the reversal; nationalist and republican parties reacted with outrage, according to RTÉ. The Orange Order has been applying, unsuccessfully, for more than a quarter of a century to complete its 1998 walk along what it regards as its traditional route from Drumcree church.
The Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition went to court. On Saturday, after a five-hour special sitting of the High Court, Ms Justice Patricia Smyth temporarily suspended both the parade and the commission’s determination, pending a full judicial review. She had first tried to coax the two sides into a voluntary postponement — the lodge, which was not represented at the hearing, was asked its view through the individual who had applied for the parade, and made clear it would not agree to any suspension. When agreement proved impossible, Smyth laid out her reasoning.
The level of mistrust between the residents and the Portadown Orange lodge cannot be overstated. Neither side accepts any reassurance provided by the other.
She added that this “particular long-running dispute has the potential to escalate within Northern Ireland,” and urged the parties “to reach an agreement for the sake of everyone in Northern Ireland, not just for your sake.” Her plea to both sides: “Be big enough to step back from the abyss.” The court heard that fears had risen on Saturday after an application for a countermarch that, it was estimated, could draw up to 5,000 people — a figure later revised to 300.
While the lawyers argued, the politicians positioned. The SDLP leader, Claire Hanna, called the parade plan “provocative” and told residents she was “so sorry” that some “bad faith actors” were “intent on reopening the hurt and the traumas of the past.” The Democratic Unionist MP Carla Lockhart insisted residents had “nothing to fear.” Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald described the decision as “utterly reckless.” From London, Prime Minister Andy Burnham appealed to leaders to “work calmly” through the weekend, while Northern Ireland secretary Chris Bryant called for “cool heads,” noting that Northern Ireland had “withstood many moments of sharp disagreement over the years.”
Then came the overnight act. Late on Saturday, the Court of Appeal convened, and Lady Chief Justice Dame Siobhan Keegan ruled that the judge who had granted the injunction had “unfortunately erred in law.” She approved a request — which, notably, had come from the residents’ own lawyers — for the case to be reheard by a different High Court judge. Counsel for the Orangemen and the Parades Commission opposed that, pointing to the lateness of the hour and the exhaustion of the legal teams. Hearing a case after midnight was “unprecedented,” the Lady Chief Justice said, but the significance of the issues merited it.
At 2.15am, Mr Justice Humphries delivered the decisive ruling, and its logic is essentially a lesson in deference. The commission, he said, had been established by Parliament to look after disputes like Drumcree; courts must respect the judgment of such bodies, whose decisions would not be “lightly interfered with.” The determination “could not be impugned” by way of judicial review. It could have been more detailed, he allowed, but it needed only to be “intelligible” — and “this determination meets that standard.” The residents’ arguments were, in his word, “unarguable,” and he refused them leave to apply for a full judicial review. That, as RTÉ noted, effectively ended the challenge.
By dawn, hundreds of nationalists had gathered on the Garvaghy Road in three distinct groups, with no visible police presence at that moment, RTÉ reported. In the early hours, the Sinn Féin leadership arrived: as Mary Lou McDonald looked on, First Minister Michelle O’Neill addressed the crowd, urging people to follow the advice they were being given, to “stay strong and to do so together.” “Tonight, let’s stay together, le chéile, le chéile, let’s stay together,” she said. Lockhart, outside court, called the outcome “seismic” and turned the spotlight on O’Neill. “We have a self-proclaimed first minister for all,” she said. “She has an almighty test ahead of her, and I can tell you now, she won’t be forgiven by the unionist and loyalist people if she does not uphold the rule of law.”
The Drumcree standoffs of the 1990s produced violent clashes for several summers and security operations on a scale Northern Ireland has spent decades trying to leave behind. On Sunday the dispute produced instead a commission ruling, an injunction, an appeal, a 2.15am judgment and a cap of 35 marchers — which is, in the bleakest reading, an enormous amount of state machinery for a short walk down one road, and, in the more hopeful one, exactly what the machinery was built for.