Alistair Graham, urged Orange Order to continue talks
The Parades Commission has banned Portadown Orangemen from marching down the nationalist Garvaghy Road this Sunday. The commission had been due to make an announcement this morning, but the decision was postponed in order to allow time for further discussions.
The Commission chairman, Alistair Graham, welcomed the positive movement by the Orange Order in recent discussions, but he said if their more flexible approach had been introduced at an earlier stage of the year as part of a genuine and sustained attempt to engage with the nationalist community, there might have been a different outcome. He urged the Portadown Orange Order to lift its protest activity and to continue its engagement with the Garvaghy residents. He stressed that no group had a right of veto over parades. There was a Loyalist bombscare during Mr Graham's speech, but it proved to be a hoax.
It emerged tonight that hundreds of British troops are to be drafted into Northern Ireland in case of trouble at next Sunday's Orange parade at Drumcree. The British prime minister Tony Blair - who is in Belfast for talks on the formation of a power-sharing executive - said that he would carry on working for a solution that treated both communities with respect but, until such a solution was found, it was vital that people continue to abide by the law. 1,000 Orangemen in Portadown tonight took to the streets to portest at today's decision; there were no confrontations.
Earlier today, a spokesman for the Orange Order said that the order was bitterly disappointed over what he described as the failure of the Garvaghy Road residents to respond to initiatives by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and First Minister David Trimble. The spokesman said that Mr Blair had acknowledged that the Orange Order had been flexible and positive but that no response was forthcoming from the residents. He said that the residents seemed content to hide behind the decision of the Parades Commission.
Talks between the Northern Ireland First Minister, David Trimble, and nationalist residents of the Garvaghy Road broke up without agreement late last night. The talks resumed this morning but there was no further progress. Emerging from Stormont House, the spokesman for the Garvaghy Road resident group, Brendan MacCionnaith, said that they seemed to have exhausted all possibilities. The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern also met the Garvaghy Road residents during the day.
In a separate development, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Walton Empey, said that the Rector of Drumcree Parish Church, the Reverend John Pickering, was going against the wishes of the Church's Synod by allowing Orangemen to attend a service in the church on the day of the parade without prior assurances that the law of the land will be adhered to.
