THE high politics of the Frameworks were of little interest to the mass of the Ulster-British population, but many of them felt that their national destiny was anything but secure. Every night on their television screens, clever and articulate Sinn Fein/IRA spokesmen seemed to win the battle of the airwaves hands down. It was part of the unremitting diet of defeat which the unionist community had suffered since 1985. But few Unionists, including Trimble, can have foreseen where their countrymen would choose to draw their line in the sand. That spot would be at Drumcree church two miles from Portadown town centre, in the heart of Trimble’s constituency. There, ever since 1807, local Orangemen had attended divine service on the Sunday before 12 July (it was the oldest recorded Orange service in the history of the Orange institution, and was almost as old as the Order itself). Thence they would march back to Portadown itself. There they would arrive to the ‘crack of the cane’ on a lambeg drum, their colourful banners – often depicting Biblical scenes – fluttering high. This scene has changed little from 1928, when the Belfast-born Catholic artist, Sir John Lavery, painted a Portadown 12th: he claimed in his diary never to have seen anything to equal its ‘austere passion’.1
Why was this? Because Portadown is, in the words of Sir John Hermon, a former Chief Constable of the RUC, ‘the Vatican of Orangeism’.2 Trimble also notes that local lodges boast a total of 1100 to 1200 members – in a town with a Protestant population of 20,000. Of these, over half are women and a quarter are juveniles, which means that perhaps as many as one in six of the eligible population are in the Order. Portadown District Lodge is numbered LOL No. 1, and as Trimble says, it regards that as being more than just an accident.3 A challenge to its prerogatives and traditions would not be suffered lightly. Disaster had narrowly been averted in the mid-1980s, when the town’s growing nationalist population demanded that parades through or close to Catholic areas be curtailed. Following negotiations with the RUC, the Orangemen surrendered the custom of passage down Obins Street. In exchange, they believed that they had won permanent right of passage down the Garvaghy Road – their traditional route to the town centre after completing the Drumcree church service on the Sunday before 12 July. They were reinforced in this belief by an RUC statement in 1986 claiming that ‘unlike the Tunnel area [where the Orangemen ceased to march], Garvaghy Road is a major thoroughfare in which Catholics and Protestants reside’. The RUC denied that any specific guarantees had been given about the Garvaghy Road – though they acknowledged that such restrictions rarely applied to major thoroughfares. Whatever the precise understanding, the parades had nonetheless gone off relatively quietly in the intervening years in the presence of the new local MP, David Trimble, who was invited as matter of courtesy to march with the District Lodge.4 Although scarcely an active Orangeman, Trimble was happy enough to take his place out of a sense of duty. Indeed, John Hunter remembers that Trimble loved turning round and watching the ranks of bowler-hatted brethren streaming down the hill to Portadown.5
But this time-honoured pageant was about to undergo its greatest challenge ever – which vaulted it into the forefront not merely of provincial concerns, but of national and international consciousness as well. For the Garvaghy Road Residents’ group, which claimed to represent the inhabitants of the nationalist housing estate which comprised part of the route of the Drumcree march, indicated that they were unhappy about the parade. They had become far more active in recent years and claimed that demographic changes in the area justified a re-routing of this offensive and intimidatory march. The Orangemen retorted that the march only skirted the nationalist estate and that in any case, the protest was orchestrated by Republicans in the person of Brendan Mac Cionnaith, convicted for offences related to the bombing of the Royal British Legion Hall in Portadown in 1981 (a point of particular significance since it was the ex-servicemen’s lodge which led the march down the Garvaghy Road). Many Orangemen saw the threatened street protests as an expression of aspects of TUAS – the IRA’s post-ceasefire strategy of Tactical Use of Armed Struggle. Republicans would thereby seek to heighten street tensions in order to provoke Orange reprisals. These would then enable them to portray themselves as defenders of the embattled Catholic community. Supporters of this contention rely on reports that Adams admitted in private to a Sinn Fein gathering at Athboy, Co. Meath, that the protests against a number of parades had not been spontaneous but that ‘three years of work went into creating that situation, and fair play to those who put the work in’.6 On the other side of the coin, Mac Cionnaith and other residents denied this and claimed it was simply a legitimate expression of nationalist rights.
On the morning of 9 July 1995, Portadown District prepared for their annual ritual in glorious sunshine, which would take them from Carleton Street Orange Hall in the town centre to the Drumcree church. The march out to Drumcree – not via Garvaghy Road – passed off quietly enough, and the service began at 11:15 a.m. During the course of it, Gareth Watson, then Deputy Master of LOL 273 spoke on several occasions to Superintendent Jim Blair, the RUC sub-divisional commander for the area. Watson had been formally appointed as Blair’s contact shortly beforehand and stayed outside the church throughout the service. As the Rev. John Pickering, the Church of Ireland Rector of the parish of Drumcree concluded his sermon and the singing of the National Anthem began, Watson saw a large number of RUC Land-Rovers heading for the church, apparently blocking the return route to Carleton Street. Subsequently, Blair called with some disturbing news for the Orangemen. He told them that there had been a disturbance on the Garvaghy Road, with sit-down protests by the residents. Blair said that the RUC blockage was there for the Orangemen’s protection, since a hostile nationalist mob might attack them, and that he would like to talk to the District officers. Portadown District duly brought David Trimble with them, relying upon him for political guidance. That said, Trimble had no master plan of action, nor any overall project in mind. Rather, he simply felt that he could not walk away and had to stay there out of a sense of personal honour and obligation to the men there.7
The Orangemen claim that the RUC did not immediately clarify the purpose of the blockage of the route in these talks: but they gave the impression that they were playing for time so that the police could clear the road. David Trimble told Gordon Lucy that neither he nor the District officers were told that the march would be ‘re-routed’.8 To increase pressure upon the RUC, some Orangemen went to Portadown to keep their brother loyalists informed. Two hundred Protestants soon blocked Corcrain Avenue, where they were serenaded by the Portadown Flute Band. Their number was joined by Billy Wright and boys, the commander of the UVF’s mid-Ulster brigade known widely as ‘King Rat’, who was suspected of the murders of numerous Catholics and republicans. Wright called the Nationalist residents a ‘rent-a-mob’ and threatened to match their numbers by bringing in loyalists from elsewhere in the Province. Wright was utterly convinced that the march was halted by the Government at the request of Cardinal Cahal Daly (the Roman Catholic Primate of Ireland), John Hume and Gerry Adams. As Lucy notes, even if Wright’s contention was wrong, after the AIA and the start of the ‘peace process’ loyalists were in a mood to believe such charges.9 Wright et al. therefore determined to make a ban on the parade even costlier than letting the march down the road.
The RUC were thus in an extremely difficult position. They were obliged legally to do whatever was necessary under the Public Order (Northern Ireland) Order 1987 – to minimise the threat to life and property. But in this context, it was hard to define what ‘minimisation’ meant. Did it mean locally, or Province-wide? Blair Wallace, then Deputy Chief Constable for Operations, recalls that the potential nightmare for the RUC was to allow 1000 loyalists to march in the teeth of the opposition from the residents as well as the possibility that ‘heavies’ might infiltrate the recesses of the nationalist estate in ones and twos without the knowledge