The Orange Order by Mervyn Jess

Author:Mervyn Jess [Jess, Mervyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, History, Europe, Great Britain, Ireland, Education, Organizations & Institutions
ISBN: 9780862789961
Google: c2WNAwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 1002963
Publisher: O'Brien Press
Published: 2007-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

SINN FÉIN PLOT

Understanding Drumcree doesn’t necessarily mean understanding every other contentious parade in Northern Ireland – each has its own distinct local problems. The Orange Order blames Sinn Féin for orchestrating these problems and it is convinced that the Republican Party devised a strategy in the early 1990s to specifically target parades.

Ruth Dudley Edwards’s book, The Faithful Tribe, a non-fiction portrait of the loyal orders, includes a transcript of a tape-recording which she says was ‘secured by a journalist….’ on which Gerry Adams is heard telling a Sinn Féin conference in 1997:

Ask any activist in the north, did Drumcree happen by accident and they will tell you no. Three years of work on the Lower Ormeau Road, Portadown and parts of Fermanagh and Newry, Armagh and Bellaghy and up in Derry. Three years of work went into creating that situation and fair play to those people who put the work in. They are the type of scene changes that we have to focus on and develop and exploit.

The Portadown lodges have been in the Orange vanguard of resisting those ‘scene changes’. The District motto is ‘Our cause is just – here we stand – we can do no other.’ Orangemen have continued to make their stand, at least in token form, on the hill at Drumcree every Sunday since 1998. In the final months of 2006 the Portadown District Lodge told the Parades Commission that it was prepared to enter into a process of mediation without pre-conditions. Taken at face value the statement suggested the Orangemen were prepared to meet the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition, which would involve Breandan MacCionnaith. The Portadown Orangemen’s spokesperson David Jones was quoted in the Portadown Times in January 2007 as saying:

Having consulted with the community and fellow Orangemen, we have told the Commission that we’re willing to enter into mediation and if this leads to face-to-face talks then we will participate.

MacCionnaith remains sceptical about the offer, believing the talks would still be conditional on the Orangemen securing a parade down the Garvaghy Road. So far the face- to-face negotiations haven’t taken place and such a scenario would have been unthinkable until 26 March 2007 when Ian Paisley astonished everybody by appearing at a press conference, sitting beside Gerry Adams announcing a power sharing deal at Stormont. Now anything is possible.

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