Incredulity and despair at the ugly Drumcree stand-off
By Andy Pollak, 2Irelands Together, October, 2026
Who would ever think of putting the legal adviser to Hamas and the fascistic ultra-Zionist Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir into a room together to negotiate a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? But something similarly unreal is happening in talks to try to find an end to the nightmarish deadlock at Drumcree. On the one side is the Portadown district of the Orange Order, often led – judging by television pictures and press statements – by its young legal adviser, the ultra-loyalist agitator Jamie Bryson. On the other are the Garvaghy Road nationalist residents, led by Breandán Mac Cionnaith, a former Provisional IRA bomber and now a member of Eirígi, an anti-Good Friday Agreement dissident republican group. Indeed, one thing these two men have in common – apart from their unelected status – is their commitment to wrecking that historic 1998 agreement which, for all its faults, has led to nearly 30 years of a large degree of peace in Northern Ireland.
According to the Belfast Telegraph‘s Sam McBride: “Sinn Féin rarely faces a rival like this, and is visibly in his wake. He sounds like a throwback to the 1990s.” He quoted Mac Cionnaith as openly referring to the Orangemen as “those fuckers,” repeatedly referring to “the Brits” and predicting that the parade would be forced through and “there will be a battle”.1
In his memoir, Tony Blair remembered that “the Drumcree people were the unreasonable of the unreasonable of the unreasonable” (he didn’t specify which side, or both). “In the Premier League of unreasonableness, they left every other faction and every other dispute gasping in their wake,” he wrote.
And then he lighted on “this one guy, Breandán Mac Cionnaith”. He painted a picture: “He took unreasonableness to an art form. He conceded nothing, and I mean nothing. I’m not just talking about the substance of meetings, I mean where a meeting should be held. Who should be there. Who shouldn’t be there. When it began. When it ended. What its purpose was. Who spoke first. Who spoke last. Who spoke in between first and last.”2
Bryson told supporters last Wednesday (three days after the scheduled march was blocked by residents from going down the Garvaghy Road): “The Portadown district are not doing any deal – there is no document on the table. And Portadown district would not be doing any deal which doesn’t deliver on the fundamental legal principle and the fundamental legal principle is this – that the Portadown district will walk the Garvaghy Road.”
Last year, Mac Cionnaith did an interview with an Éirígí podcast, in which he likened the Orange Order to the Ku Klux Klan, saying he’d told this to ethnic minorities in England who saw the Drumcree situation as “a very overt form of racism, similar to what they were dealing with”. Rather than seeing unionism as a wholly legitimate political ideology, he suggested there was a media conspiracy to avoid scrutinising it: “They’ll all back away from the hard questions; you know, what is unionism? What does it represent? What did it represent? It represented a one-party state in the six counties, similar to the one you had in South Africa.” How this kind of extremely hard-line language and demonisation of unionists is going to help nationalists and unionists to come together in a mutually respectful united Ireland one day soon is highly questionable.
The resurrection of the dreadful corpse that was the Drumcree parade, banned for 28 years by the Parades Commission, was the result of sloppy procedures and a technical error by that body, and a series of last minute court hearings in Belfast which failed to find against its resulting legality. One is tempted to say this was an example of the law being “an ass.” One judge, later over-ruled in another midnight high court hearing, had urged the parties in the parade dispute to “step back from the abyss” and reach a compromise for the sake of everyone in Northern Ireland. Six hours after that middle-of-the-night hearing, the legally-permitted march was blocked by residents in Garvaghy Road.
Compromise in Portadown?
The crying need for compromise was also the message from the Alliance leader and justice minister, Naomi Long. Speaking on RTE, she said the people of the North were experiencing “incredulity and a degree of despair” that this long-forgotten trauma had re-emerged. She said the Orange Order had now established in law that that they had the right to walk the Garvaghy Road. “They do not have to exercise that right”, she went on. “They can do the right thing by the community on the Garvaghy Road”, as well as the entire people of Northern Ireland, by not marching along that nationalist road. She pointed out that there was another undisputed route of exactly the same length which they could march home on from Drumcree church to Portadown Orange Hall.
“I appeal for people to be wise,” she continued. “Courts can’t rule for reconciliation. That requires people to show wisdom and courage and grace and generosity. And that’s what’s required at this point in time.” However she regretted that those who “have unpicked this wound and have gone about trying to drag us back to the past are not minded to make the compromise that is required.” Wisdom and courage and grace and generosity in Portadown? Pigs would fly to Pluto first.
[I only wish that that Northern voters could become mature and non-tribal enough to add enough of their votes to the already growing Alliance total, so that one day soon a wise and smart and even-handed woman like Naomi Long might become First Minister.]
Not much wisdom was shown by opposition politicians in the Republic either as senior members of Aontú, People Before Profit and the Social Democrats lined up with the northern nationalist tribe and queued for photo opportunities on the Garvaghy Road. There is no difficult situation in Northern Ireland that can’t be made worse by the noisy arrival of Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald and her entourage. ” If the march was permitted, “by God, there will be a reckoning”, she declared.
The Irish Times political editor, Pat Leahy, concluded that the message of their presence to middle of the road ‘persuadables’ in the North – many of them moderate unionists – is that “in a united Ireland, many southern politicians are full square behind northern nationalists. That can only make them wary of the promises that unionists will be entitled to full respect and protection in the ‘new Ireland’.”3
Contagion?
One of the gravest fears now is contagion; that what started in Portadown will envelop other parades, with old disputes resurrected by the Orange Order and new objections raised by nationalists. Sam McBride interviewed Noel Liggett, district master of the Ballynafeigh Orange lodge in Belfast’s Ormeau Road, another former flashpoint which has been peaceful for many years (constituency MP and SDLP leader Clare Hanna, who was at the Garvaghy Road protest, nominated Liggett for an MBE), says he still hopes the order can walk the length of that road again. He wants Southern voters to know that “they are nowhere near ready for taking on Northern Ireland – they haven’t even begun to think of the type of compromise that would have to be made…or the tensions and difficulties they would be taking on.”4
In a column last week McBride put the Drumcree imbroglio in the context of the near total breakdown of government at Stormont. Unionist and nationalist politicians there are “united in despondency” he wrote.5 And the unapologetic appearance of First Minister Michelle O’Neill (who took office promising she would be a ‘First Minister for all’) at an illegal protest on the Garvaghy Road did not help at all.
McBride wrote that power-sharing is “now characterised by not quite hatred, but is approaching that depth of intense dislike.” Sinn Fein and the DUP “might still believe in power-sharing — most, in fact, still accept that it is the only basis on which Northern Ireland can be governed — but I do not believe a single MLA genuinely thinks this Assembly or Executive is capable of doing what they have promised the public they will do. When devolution was restored two and a half years ago, Michelle O’Neill and DUP Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly both told their voters not to simply judge them on survival, but on delivery. Now it seems they might not even manage to clear the first of those bars. There’s not even a one per cent chance they’ll clear the second.”
He gave the example of last Tuesday’s Assembly sitting, which, even allowing for a considerable period for arguing about Drumcree, was suspended after 47 minutes because they couldn’t think of much else to do. He pointed out that that morning Sinn Fein’s Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins had tabled a piece of legislation to extend the period when there will be no domestic water charges — even for the wealthiest homeowners — for another five years. “That means that until at least 2032, the health, education, roads, housing and other budgets will have to be raided for NI Water. And even with that, there’s nowhere near enough money, meaning that raw sewage is being poured into Lough Neagh — and then the drinking water for 40% of Northern Ireland is being drawn from that same heavily polluted waterbody.
“This is a vast scandal for which Stormont is primarily to blame. It has implications most obviously for the environment, but also for agriculture, for house-building, for tourism, for the economy and for nearly every area of life. The Speaker told MLAs that there was no time limit on the debate. They could have spent days discussing this crucial policy. But, no, after Kimmins spoke, just two of the 90 MLAs made short perfunctory speeches before the policy was nodded through.”
The Republic has a different dilemma. Pat Leahy asked whether the South was ready to take on the near-insoluble problems of northern sectarianism like Drumcree. “Given the general disinterest in the North among many people in the South…a lot of people in the South might quietly conclude: this is not our problem. They’ll ask themselves: why should we import that sectarian mindset down here? Why would we want that security nightmare? That additional cost?
“Many people in the Republic will believe that the costs of a united Ireland – financial or otherwise – are worth it. But those who want to consider the price the South would have to pay – in social, political, constitutional, security, identity and financial terms – before they make up their mind, will have been given much to think about over the past week.
“The great unity nightmare has always been that in parallel referendums, the North says ‘yes’ and the South says ‘eh, no thanks.’ I fear that outcome has been made more likely by the events in Drumcree.”
1 ‘Marching backwards: Drumcree stand-off hardens even moderate hearts as fear of contagion mounts’, Belfast Telegraph, 4 October
2 Gerry Moriarty, ‘Breandán Mac Cionnaith profile: ‘The ex-IRA man who Tony Blair said ‘took unreasonableness to an art form’, Irish Times, 29 September
3 ‘Is the South ready to take on problems like Drumcree?’ Irish Times, 3 October
4 ‘Marching backwards: Drumcree stand-off hardens even moderate hearts as fear of contagion mounts.’
5 ‘There are no true believers in Stormont any more. It is a place of despondency where MLAs knock off early’, Belfast Telegraph, 3 October
A depressing week, but reasons for hope amid gloom of Drumcree
SAM McBRIDE, Belfast Telegraph, October 1st, 2026
Last Thursday night I was in Dublin to take part in a student debate at UCD. The topic was sensitive: 'This house believes that the Irish Tricolour has become a symbol of division'.
At a time when even discussing certain hard topics has gone out of fashion in certain quarters, it was refreshing to be among young people who wanted to debate difficult and divisive issues, deploying rationality and rhetoric rather than shouting or deplatforming or name-calling.
Rational debate is the bedrock of democracy. Imperfect as it is to argue about the issues on which we disagree, this is the best means we have found of resolving our differences. The alternatives are all much worse, as we in Northern Ireland know better than most.
The following day, I came back to Belfast on the Enterprise in time to avoid the security alerts which began targeting the service once the Parades Commission ruled that 35 Orangemen could early on Sunday morning walk in silence without flags or supporters along Garvaghy Road in Portadown.
The last time there was an Orange parade on that road, I was at school. I recall the 1990s Drumcree crises as the point where my parents' attempts to shield me from the Troubles became impossible. Roads were blocked, rumours were rife, and it was clear that something deeply unusual was happening, even in the context of the Troubles.
I now know that I was mercifully ignorant of the true scale of the crisis and that, unlike so many, I suffered nothing in that period beyond the mildest inconvenience.
I've since read declassified government files setting out the alarm within the security forces at the terrifying level of violence prompted by a dispute which on no rational or moral basis justified the taking of a single life, yet led to an orgy of thuggery as emotions ran out of control. A 1996 file recorded a military assessment that “Drumcree was, quite simply, a disaster for both communities…they were now as far apart as ever”.
That assessment feels pertinent after the events of recent days. Unionism and nationalism are not, of course, as far apart as they have ever been, but the speed with which both camps have reverted to their trenches has been revelatory.
There are strategic perils here for both sides. The Orange Order was seriously weakened by the 1990s Drumcree standoffs. It lost members, lost influence and lost credibility. Over recent years that has been significantly rebuilt to the point where there has been the longest period without major parade disputes since before the Troubles and loyalist bands were warmly welcomed to the Fleadh, with the Taoiseach travelling up.
Strategic perils
All of that is fragile. Ultimately the Orange must realise that even if it was able to march where it is strongly opposed by local residents, that wouldn't be in its wider interests, let alone in the wider interests of unionism, an ideology which now includes many people who have no affinity to Orangeism.
But there are also strategic perils here for nationalism. So much of republicanism's move into politics has involved maximising the gains to be had from legal routes. Here the Orange changed course to do likewise - and won, fairly and squarely.
By ignoring that, First Minister Michelle O'Neill endorsed a 'might is right' strategy where she openly flouted the law and defied the police to remove hundreds of people from Garvaghy Road. Others will do likewise. Some of those will be loyalists but this is also being watched by racists and other thugs who loathe the law. Respect for the rule of law ought to lead us to respect legal decisions with which we profoundly disagree.
I've heard all sorts of arguments for breaking the law this week - it was the responsible thing to do, it was the moral thing to do, sure these are British imperialist laws anyway, judges don't understand this, and on and on. These arguments can be used in all sorts of other scenarios by other people. The end point of ignoring the law is chaos.
The alternative to respecting the law was on display on Sunday: Representatives of virtually all of nationalism - from the SDLP to Sinn Féin - were standing in an unlawful gathering alongside dissident republicans who support murdering the police, with all of those in the crowd ignoring police warnings to disperse because they were breaking the law.
There are perfectly legitimate arguments against the Orange parading on Garvaghy Road, and reasonable criticisms of the Parades Commission decision or the police advice to the commission. But this has been examined by Northern Ireland's highest court and judges have come to a decision. Moving into territory where otherwise moderate and reasonable people see that as unimportant is perilous.
In any debate — whether in politics or in court — both sides must respect the outcome, accepting that they can't always win. For years, the Orange Order refused to accept this. It is significant that it does now accept it cannot simply march wherever it likes and there needs to be some independent adjudicator to examine each situation.
My side didn't win the UCD debate last week. But there's a certain irony to what we were discussing that night. I was arguing that while the Irish Tricolour is clearly divisive it represents a wonderful ideal.
It speaks to a hope that both main traditions on this island might live together in harmony, of a promised land where swords are beaten into ploughshares, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and where orange and green can respect one another.
Tribal abuse and civility
I am not a member of the Orange Order, nor have I ever talked about my personal politics. Yet after daring to criticise the First Minister for breaking the law, I received a slew of sectarian messages and emails.
My colleagues from all backgrounds have received similar abuse from every side. This has exposed an unresolved tribal ugliness which has lain just out of view. It's on weeks like this that living in Northern Ireland can feel unrelentingly gloomy.
You might now be thinking that the headline of this story was misleading.
Yet, as depressing as this week has been, our dismay should be informed by a knowledge of where we once were. At the time of writing (and, I hope, at the time of reading), not a single person has been injured, much less killed.
The residents and the Orange Order are talking. The Chief Constable said he has launched a criminal investigation into those who broke the law on Sunday. While the Assembly chamber this week was a bearpit of furious rhetoric where little legislating was done, even there people are still using words to try to get their way.
More than 28 years after the Good Friday Agreement, we should aspire to far more than what we have. But we shouldn't take for granted that there are people walking around Northern Ireland today who would now be dead if the worst of the Drumcree violence in the 1990s had restarted. I recently read these words from the late Chief Rabbi of England and Wales, Jonathan Sacks, which seem apt for where we are: “Civility is more than good manners. It is a recognition that violent speech leads to violent deeds; that listening respectfully to your opponents is a necessary part of the politics of a free society; and that liberal democracy, predicated as it is on the dignity of diversity, must keep the peace between contending groups by honouring us all equally, in both our diversity and our commonalities.
“All politics is about the pursuit of power, but liberal democratic politics carries with it a special responsibility to use that power for the dignity of each and the good of all.”
There is a fragility to all things, and at moments like this that is unnerving. But we are not yet past the point of no return.
Drumcree’s sad theatre of the absurd recalls Monty Python
FINTAN O’TOOLE, Irish Times, October 6th, 2026
Economists will tell us that you can’t have inflation and deflation at the same time. But then, they’ve never been to Portadown. The trick of tribal politics is to combine bigging-up with belittlement. Grievance is magnified; grief is diminished.
On one side of the Drumcree/Garvaghy Road stand-off, there is a monstrous mismatch between the supposed grand purpose of the Orange parade and its mean little reality.
The march is claimed to be a commemoration not only of the Battle of the Boyne, but of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, in which there were more than a million casualties, including about 300,000 deaths. This was a catastrophe shared by Ulster Protestants and Irish Catholics – around 3,500 men from the island of Ireland, serving in the 16th (Irish) and 36th (Ulster) Divisions, lost their lives.
How should a European cataclysm of such unimaginable dimensions be commemorated? What form of ritual solemnity could be expressive of a deep enough sorrow? How about walking down a road just to get a rise out of the neighbours?
There is only one thing that joins the Somme and the Drumcree parade: a profound sense of futility. In the theatre of the absurd, the Somme is the tragic epic, Drumcree the am-dram village-hall staging of Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks sketch.
No one has ever tried to stop the Orangemen from marching to and from Drumcree. Their point is that they cannot bear to walk home the way they walked out – the route must, at all costs, be circular. A straight line represents intolerable oppression.
This hyping-up is also a terrible dumbing-down. It dishonours the memory of the dead. It does so in macrocosm by turning the immense tragedy of the Somme into desultory farce. And then it does so in microcosm by disregarding the 21 people, including children Richard, Mark and Jason Quinn, who died in the violence surrounding the previous Drumcree conflict of 1996 to 1999.
But let’s not forget that there’s a similarly grotesque inflation on the other side. A banner reads: “From Gaza to Garvaghy Rd, Resist Occupation & Fascism.” Just as the Orangemen use the vast horror of the Somme to make themselves look epic, this comparison of the difficult situation faced by Garvaghy Road residents to the pulverising of three entire cities, the killing of at least 74,000 people and the wounding of 173,000, the killing or wounding of 64,000 children and the obliteration of schools, libraries, mosques and medical centres, is obscene overstatement.
Anyone with a knowledge either of history or of the contemporary world should know what occupation and fascism look like. Northern Ireland is not occupied – its sovereignty is entirely a matter to be decided by a majority of its population in a democratic vote. And 35 ould fellas in suits walking silently down a road at 8am is not fascism.
Nor does it need to be in order to be visibly wrong. The Parades Commission’s determination to allow the slimmed-down parade is foolish enough in its combination of recklessness and complacency not to require amplification into a world-historical catastrophe.
Existential insults
This egregious exaggeration is a return to what Liam Kennedy memorably called MOPE syndrome – Most Oppressed People Ever. During the Troubles, car bombs and the slaughter of civilians were justified by the pretence that the situation of Catholics in Northern Ireland was just like that of black people under apartheid in South Africa or the Jim Crow regime in the southern states of the US.
This wasn’t true then. Anti-Catholic discrimination under the unionist monopoly of power was open, official and obvious. It was bad enough – it didn’t need overblown comparisons.
And it’s even less true now. There is no anti-Catholic discrimination in Northern Ireland now. The Orange state is long gone: the very fact that the First Minister Michelle O’Neill is out protesting on the side of the Garvaghy Road residents tells us so. But if you can’t credibly evoke apartheid or Jim Crow, reach for Gaza.
Why all this hype? Because the political soup of the day is competitive victimhood. Slights cannot be slight. Frustrations cannot be mere irritants. Disappointments cannot be just let-downs. Every insult must be existential, every provocation unendurable.
In this sense, the 2026 Drumcree/ Garvaghy Road drama is not only a return to the nightmare of the 1990s. It’s also a very 21st-century production. We live in a culture in which, for example, Liam Gallagher of Oasis can compare the plight of his cheating club Manchester City to “Jesus prepared to die on the cross”. A sense of proportion doesn’t play well on X.
We used to pray that Northern Ireland would become more like the rest of the world. What’s happened, of course, is that the rest of the world has become more like Northern Ireland. Polarisation is the engine of politics across the democratic world – and it requires minor flashpoints to be stoked up into major conflagrations.
Protestant victimhood
Everybody must be a victim. In reality, the Orange Order is a declining institution. Its membership halved between 1948 and 2009, and has continued to drop since. Its influence, once pervasive, is minimal. Its only hope is to be the vector not of Protestant supremacy, but of Protestant victimhood – not being allowed to walk in a circle is woeful oppression.
But to respond to toxic hyperbole with counter-hyperbole is not just unwise, but profoundly disrespectful of real suffering. When you map Gaza on to Garvaghy, you inflate the latter but simultaneously deflate the former. In this false equivalence, the scale of the horror that is still being inflicted on Palestinians is brought down to the level of a nasty local row.
There is no need to summon the vast throngs of the dead from the Somme or Gaza. Portadown is haunted by far too many dead already. They died for the grotesque equation in which a human life is a point to be scored. Respect for their memories should be expressed in the only slogan that tells the truth: it is not worth it.
