Garvaghy Road: Surely Nothing Could go Wrong Responding to this news…

The Parades Commission has approved an Orange Order march down Portadown’s Garvaghy Road on Sunday 27 September, for the first time since 1998. If your first thought was, “Wasn’t this one of Northern Ireland’s most difficult disputes?”, congratulations: you have an excellent memory. If your second thought was, “Why on earth are we reopening it?”, you are asking a very good question.

I think the decision is a mistake. Garvaghy Road is not simply a road someone picked because the scenery is nice. Disputes over Orange parades there brought years of confrontation in the 1990s, and residents have strongly opposed the march returning. For nearly three decades, keeping it off this route has helped people get on with their lives. The arrangement did not cure every division in Northern Ireland, but it did have one compelling feature: it avoided reopening this particular row.

And yet here we are, taking an issue that had been left alone for 28 years and giving it a fresh appointment in everyone’s diary. This seems rather like finding an old argument in a drawer, dusting it off and announcing that it deserves another outing.

Supporters of the march have a right to explain why the route matters to them. But the people who live along Garvaghy Road have a right to be more than a footnote in that explanation. They are the ones being asked to host a deeply unwanted reminder of a painful period. A decision about their neighbourhood should start by listening to them, not by wondering how much discomfort can be fitted into a Sunday morning.

The commission knows this is sensitive. Its approval comes with detailed restrictions, and the decision is expected to face a legal challenge. That makes the ruling feel less like a confident step towards reconciliation and more like someone saying, “This should be fine,” while carefully checking where the exits are.

Supporters of the parade say it will be brief and peaceful. I hope it is. But “only 35 people” is a strange answer to residents talking about decades of history. You cannot measure the impact of a parade with a headcount and a stopwatch. If you could, the commission’s job would be wonderfully easy, and its decisions could be made with a calculator and a bus timetable.

Carla Lockhart’s response to the wider dispute does not inspire much confidence either. When a court quashed an earlier commission decision because of flaws in its process, the DUP MP called it a victory for “unionism and loyalism”. She praised loyalist activist Jamie Bryson (convicted terrorist btw) for his work on the legal challenge and suggested that abolishing the commission should be considered. The process needed to be put right. But the victory lap from Lockhart and Bryson makes it easier to see why residents might feel that their neighbourhood has become a political prize. To me, that is the scarily right-wing part of Lockhart’s approach: the urge to turn a delicate question of living together into a contest with a winner.

Northern Ireland’s peace is not a museum piece that can be admired while everyone goes back to doing whatever they like. It is maintained by choices people make now: to listen, to show restraint and, occasionally, to accept that getting your preferred route is less important than keeping faith with your neighbours. That might sound less exciting than declaring victory. Peace often is. Its great selling point is that people get to live ordinary lives.

I hope Sunday is peaceful. But a calm day would not automatically make this a wise decision. The question is what happens to trust when residents say a march through their community is unwelcome and the answer is to approve it anyway. Garvaghy Road did not need to be turned back into a test of wills. There are enough things to argue about in 2026 without retrieving a dispute from the 1990s and giving it a new calendar invite.

Now this is all very funny for me to write (not funny ha ha) considering I have zero memory of this taking place as I was merely a figment of my mother and father’s imagination. But as someone who always fears for the political state and peace process of Northern Ireland, and the entirety of the island, this feels like a step in the wrong direction entirely. Myself and the DUP’s views have never and will never align, so the turnout from their party does not shock me in the slightest.

Let me know what you think, and I’ll see you in the next one.

Eva :)