Judgment due in Orange Order challenge to Drumcree parade ban

Belfast High Court is expected to hand down judgment in a legal challenge to the ban imposed by Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Bryant on the Drumcree Orange Order parade in Portadown — the march prohibited on October 9 after police concluded officers could not safely escort it down the Garvaghy Road.

The sequence that produced the ban is the substance of the case, the Standard reports. Earlier this year the Parades Commission, the statutory body that adjudicates contested marches, approved the parade's traditional route down the mainly nationalist Garvaghy Road for the first time in almost 30 years. Large crowds then gathered on the road in opposition. The PSNI assessed that officers could not safely escort the parade while the crowds remained. The Orangemen stayed on Drumcree Hill, spending almost two weeks approaching the police line to press their case, until Bryant — after talks with the two sides failed to produce an agreed resolution — banned the march.

The judicial review, brought by an Orange Order member, names both Bryant and PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher, and is the latest in a series of legal challenges to the dispute. Last week Mr Justice Scoffield heard a challenge to the legality of the decision-making route. Counsel for Bryant argued the secretary of state could have taken "no other decision" than halting the parade. The court also heard PSNI intelligence that dissident republicans may have mounted gun attacks on police had officers cleared a path for the march.

Drumcree made Portadown a flashpoint of the 1990s, when the annual standoff sparked serious disorder and violence across Northern Ireland. The question before the court is narrower: whether a secretary of state may lawfully ban a parade that the body created to regulate parades had approved, when police judged escorting it past the crowds unsafe and intelligence warned of gun attacks if officers cleared a path.

Outside Belfast High Court, loyalist spokesperson Jamie Bryson and Timothy Gaston MLA spoke to the media as the parties awaited the ruling.

The parade has not completed its route down the Garvaghy Road in almost 30 years. This year the route was approved, then banned, and the Orangemen spent almost two weeks at the police line making their case.