Talks aimed at resolving the Drumcree parade dispute have broken up without agreement, with the Northern Ireland secretary, Chris Bryant, describing the situation as being between a “rock and a hard place”.
Speaking on Thursday night after the latest talks with the Orange Order and residents of Garvaghy Road broke up, Bryant said: “I think this is the end of these conversations. We haven’t come to a settled agreement, and it’s a shame, but my door remains open.”
Last Friday’s Parades Commission decision to grant the Orange Order the right to hold a procession down the nationalist Garvaghy Road plunged Northern Ireland into one of its most perilous periods since the 1998 peace deal.
A legal appeal by the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition originally scheduled for Friday has been pushed back to Monday to facilitate any further talks.
“Obviously we’ll have to see how that plays out,” Bryant said, indicating he would not be intervening unilaterally. “I would say that the law, in the end, is the law.”
Five days of talks ended in deadlock, he said, outlining the compromises on the table for the first time. “We’ve discussed a wide range of options, including mediation, including an option where the right to march was respected but wasn’t exercised, including an option where there was a final march and no further applications for marches into the future, and we’ve not managed to come to agreement on any of all that.”
Earlier in the week, reports suggested one option was a “one and done” parade involving just a dozen people without insignia in October. This would have been on condition the Orange Order would never apply for permit for that parade route again.
Breandán Mac Cionnaith, of the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition said “the reality is” there was “no such thing as half a march”. “There’s a march or there’s not a march – simply that,” he said.
Jamie Bryson, a legal adviser to the Orange Order, who earlier this week said he would “not surrender” said he would accept Monday’s ruling.
“The challenge that we would put down to the Garvaghy Road residents – they’re going to the court of appeal on Monday – if the court of appeal upholds this determination, commit to accepting the law and walk away, and we’ll do the same,” he said. “Abide by the law, and if the court of appeal upholds the determination, get off the road, stop breaking the law and allow the parade to go ahead. If we lose, we’ll accept that.”
The dispute began last week after the march along the mainly nationalist Garvaghy Road was given the go-ahead by the Parades Commission for the first time since 1998, a decision denounced by Sinn Féin as “madness” and by the taoiseach as “incomprehensible and wrong”.
The dispute, which threatened to collapse Stormont and has returned Northern Ireland to bleak days of the past, has also revived the interest of key US Democrats. Richie Neal, the US representative for Massachussetts’ 1st congressional district, described the parade as “needlessly provocative”.
The Congressional Friends of Ireland Caucus, which Neal sits on, wrote to Bryant urging him to use his powers to reverse the Parades Commission decision.
“Over the last three decades, the progress made on the island of Ireland has been nothing short of extraordinary. Twenty-eight years have passed since the signing of the Good Friday agreement, and a generation has grown without a single memory of the Troubles,” the lawmakers wrote.
“Without decisive action, we risk reopening one of the most painful chapters of Northern Ireland’s history and undermining nearly three decades of peace, stability and reconciliation made possible by the Good Friday agreement.”
The Northern Ireland Policing Board has been told that the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) operation around the parading dispute has topped £3m.
