Northern Ireland leader accused of joining ‘mob’ to block Protestant parade

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — The leaders of Northern Ireland’s cross-community government traded bitter accusations Monday over the rights and wrongs of a long-banned Protestant parade — a sectarian dispute that threatens to smash their fragile coalition.

Only two years ago, the Irish Catholics of Sinn Féin and the British Protestants of the Democratic Unionist Party revived their coalition government, an alliance of enemies at the heart of Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord. Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin became first minister, and Emma Little-Pengelly of the Democratic Unionists deputy first minister, in a system that can survive only if these sectarian rivals work together.

But when Sunday’s planned parade by the Orange Order brotherhood through Portadown was blocked by protesters from passing through the town’s main Catholic district, O’Neill and other senior Sinn Féin figures rushed to join the anti-Orange demonstrators on the disputed Garvaghy Road.

“Michelle O’Neill decided to follow the law of the mob and not the law of the land,” Little-Pengelly said in remarks directed at the Sinn Féin benches across the chamber.

Little-Pengelly accused O’Neill of standing “shoulder to shoulder” on the Garvaghy Road with senior members of the outlawed Provisional IRA, which has observed a cease-fire since 1997, and with leading Irish Republican Army dissidents who still plot bombings and shootings. “Sinn Fein are steeped in the history of murder … in the history of blood,” she said.

O’Neill shot back: “Why do the Orange Order, why do the DUP, why do unionism in general want to trample the rights of these people?” She said Portadown’s Catholics living along the Garvaghy Road “are entitled to live their life free from fear and intimidation.”

The planned parade, by 35 members of Northern Ireland’s main Protestant fraternal group, had been given legal sanction by the Parades Commission, an independent body tasked with minimizing conflict in a polarized society where Orangemen mount thousands of drum-thumping marches each year. The commission’s last-minute decision, after 28 years of refusals, thrilled the Democratic Unionists and shocked Sinn Féin.

Several hundred protesters — furious over the threatened reopening of a route that had triggered widespread violence in the mid-1990s, culminating in a 1998 ban  — blocked the Garvaghy Road all night and refused to budge. Stuck in the middle between two stubborn camps, the Police Service of Northern Ireland decided not to confront the much larger group of protesters.

As Orangemen found their path eventually blocked by police armored cars, O’Neill gave an impromptu speech urging locals to keep blocking the road past midnight, lest the police perform an overnight U-turn and let the Orangemen through.

Her stand has provided a point of attack for unionists, many of whom want to see the Democratic Unionists withdraw from the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont — since that’s the only legal way to force O’Neill and Sinn Féin out of power, too. The government cannot function unless the largest parties on both sides of the divide agree to cooperate.

Sinn Féin and the DUP are girding up for the next assembly elections due by May 2027. Both parties appear to agree that there’s more votes to be won from rekindling winner-takes-all fights over symbols and turf, than in running a government that has struggled to achieve anything concrete.

As Little-Pengelly confronted her executive equal inside the chamber, her own Democratic Unionist boss, Gavin Robinson, told reporters outside that his party would file a formal complaint against O’Neill with Stormont’s Commissioner for Standards — a first step towards seeking her censure or ouster via a vote of no confidence.

That seems next to impossible, given that the core rules of Stormont power-sharing require majority backing on both sides of the house for such moves —and Sinn Féin, the largest party in the chamber, won’t vote to expel its own leader.

Robinson also called on the police commander, Chief Constable Jon Boutcher, to confirm he will charge O’Neill and other Sinn Féin politicians who joined the Garvaghy Road protest. The police, he said, must “demonstrate clearly that the law applies equally to everyone, that nobody irrespective of rank has a ‘get out of jail free’ card.”

The Orange Order, likewise, called for the police to crack down on the protesters, particularly the Sinn Féin figures in their ranks.

While Northern Ireland’s local leaders put their divisions on display, the U.K. minister overseeing the territory, the newly appointed Secretary of State Chris Bryant, tried quietly to seek compromise with the grassroots figures driving the conflict in Portadown.

His meetings with separate delegations from the Portadown branch of the Orange Order and the Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition took place behind closed doors at Bryant’s official residence, Hillsborough Castle midway between Belfast and Portadown.

The two groups left insisting their core, incompatible demands remained—for the Orangemen, to “finish” a march barred from the Garvaghy Road in 1998; and for the area’s residents, to ensure that Orangemen never set foot there again.

Undaunted, Bryant said he came away believing he could see “a good outcome … through the mist.”

He then jetted back across the Irish Sea to the annual conference of the governing Labour Party in Liverpool.