The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.63/No.25           July 12, 1999 
 
 
Irish Nationalists Call For Mobilization To Defend Garvaghy Road Community  

BY CAROLINE BELLAMY
LONDON - Irish nationalists have stepped up their campaign to defend the Garvaghy Road community in Portadown, Northern Ireland, from rightist attack. The June 10 issue of An Phoblacht/Republican News, the newspaper of Sinn Fein, published a call for nationalists across Ireland to stand ready to support the Garvaghy Road residents leading up to the planned July 4 parade through their neighborhood by the pro- British Orange Order. Friends of the Garvaghy Road committees have been formed across Ireland, Britain, and the United States.

"My community is not going to sit back and take this," said Breandán Mac Cionnaith, speaking to some 120 trade unionists and Irish activists in London May 8, the day after the formation of the Friends of the Garvaghy Road committee here. "Others must join us. It is time to stand up and confront sectarianism. We need support and action this year." Mac Cionnaith is a leader of the Garvaghy Road Residents' Coalition in Portadown. The coalition is fighting for the re-routing of marches by the rightist Orange Order away from the Garvaghy Road area, where 95 percent of the residents are Catholic.

The July Orange Order march to the Drumcree church in Portadown - one of hundreds of annual triumphalist parades by right-wing Protestant groups in the occupied counties - has been a focus of confrontation since 1995. Last year, for the first time, residents prevented the march from going through their neighborhood. "We're not against marches," explained Joanne Tennyson, a Garvaghy resident speaking in London in January. "We only disagree with the one to Drumcree church because it comes back down the Garvaghy Road and disrupts our lives. It's about the Orange Order walking all over us. You've got 7,000 Orangemen going to a church that can't hold more than 200. They're not going there to hear the word of God."

Rightist parades back British rule
These triumphalist marches are aimed at reinforcing anti- Catholic repression and upholding the Protestant privileges that have been key to London's rule in the north of Ireland. In the last year, the Orange Order has held more than 170 marches and rallies in Portadown. Countless nationalists have been assaulted and their homes attacked, a Catholic church at Harryville has been picketed to stop churchgoers attending, and Rosemary Nelson, the civil rights lawyer who represented the Garvaghy residents, was murdered in March.

Nationalist residents are subject to daily attacks. Catholic-owned businesses and houses have been burned and bombed, and families intimidated from their homes. Recently a 16-year-old girl had a bottle of Coke smashed in her face and a nationalist resident was beaten nearly to death by rightist thugs. Elizabeth O'Neill, 59, a Protestant woman married to a Catholic, was killed by a pipe bomb thrown into her home June 5. She was the 10th person to die as a direct result of Orange Order protests in Portadown since July 1996. The police and government response has been negligible.

"The Orange Order say they stand for civil and religious liberty," commented Mac Cionnaith at the launch of the Friends of the Garvaghy Road in London May 7. But when it was founded in 1795 "there was an organization that stood for civil rights and equality -the United Irishmen.

"The Orange Order was founded as a counterrevolutionary force to oppose and oppress the United Irishmen, to create sectarian division where others were trying to heal. Militia units controlled by Orange lodges opposed all Catholic emancipation and home rule. It had its own political party, the Unionist party." After the partition of Ireland in 1920, the Orange Order controlled the state in the six Irish counties that were held by London as part of the United Kingdom, he added.

"People talk about the marches issue as one of competing rights. If we were talking about a fascist march or the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, no one would be talking about competing rights but about a denial of the rights of the minority," Mac Cionnaith said.

The Good Friday Agreement, signed last year by the British and Irish governments and major nationalist and Unionist parties, guaranteed the right to live free from sectarian harassment. Events in Portadown, however, show the agreement is not being upheld, Mac Cionnaith said.

"The agreement says we have the right to live free from discrimination and to have freedom of economic activity. This has been denied to us for the last ten generations. Catholics make up 32 percent of the population of Portadown, about 6,500 people. But we have only 2 out of 7 electoral wards," he said. "Forty-three percent of the unemployed are Catholic, and 50 percent of the long-term unemployed. The biggest employer in Portadown makes carpets, actually on the Garvaghy Road. The workforce is 610 people and less than 90 are Catholics."

The Orange Order is determined that this year's march will go ahead. Portadown Orange Order spokesman David Jones threatened in May that if the group cannot march down the Garvaghy Road by July 4, "we are on a slippery slope towards something possibly as serious as civil war...[and] the problem won't be at Drumcree, it will be throughout the country."

The Parades Commission, which was set up by the British government in 1997, has given loyalists permission to go ahead with a "Long March" through Northern Ireland. It will start in Derry June 24 and arrive in Portadown to take part in the Drumcree parade. An Phoblacht reports that various loyalist groupings are joining forces, intent on an all out offensive in the build up to Drumcree. In response the British government has deployed 2,000 soldiers. This is addition to the 15,000 troops that already occupy Northern Ireland today.

Residents appeal for support
In turn, the Resident's Coalition has been reaching out broadly to mobilize support. In the last few weeks members have traveled to venues across Ireland to recount their experiences. The Friends of Garvaghy Road groups are organizing delegations of supporters and observers to go there over the weekend of the Drumcree march. More than 20 will be going from London. A "food column" is planned to go from West Belfast, and a demonstration of 1,000 was held in Dublin June 19.

There will be a delegation of 50 people, organized by the Irish Emergency Parades Committee, traveling to Portadown from the United States as international observers. Irish Northern Aid has also called for a week of actions throughout the United States to show solidarity with the fighters of the Garvaghy Road.

The demand of the Orangemen to march down the Garvaghy Road is "at the core" of the loyalist campaign of violence, said Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, the party leading the fight to end British rule in Ireland.

"The vacuum generated by the failure to implement the Good Friday Agreement is being increasingly filled by loyalist bomb and gun attacks on nationalists, and the wholesale intimidation of the Garvaghy Road community," Adams added.

The British and Irish governments have backed Unionist attempts to block the convening of a new Northern Ireland Executive. They demand that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) decommission its weapons before this and other bodies are set up.

Meanwhile, Sinn Fein celebrated record gains in the June 10 elections to the European Parliament, and in local elections held in the Irish Republic the same day. In the six-county European election, Sinn Fein increased its vote from 9.9 percent in 1994 to 17.3 percent. In the Republic of Ireland its vote doubled from 3 percent of first preferences in 1994 to 6.3 percent.

In response to the public inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday-January 30, 1972, when members of the British army's Parachute regiment shot 14 unarmed civil rights protesters dead in Derry-the right-wing Daily Mail has been running a "Don't betray the Paras" campaign. Referring to the Parachute regiment as "heroes," the paper cites their role spearheading the NATO "peacekeeping" force in Kosova.

On June 17 the high court in London ruled that soldiers who testify in the inquiry should be allowed anonymity. One of those who may be called to give evidence at the inquiry is Gen. Michael Jackson, the commander of K-FOR in Kosova. He was an adjutant in the Parachute regiment on Bloody Sunday. Among those under his command in Kosova will be Mark Wright and James Fisher, two British soldiers convicted of the 1992 murder of Belfast teenager Peter McBride.

Caroline Bellamy is a member of the Transport and General Workers Union in London.

 
 
 
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