PORTADOWN, Northern Ireland – Leaders of Northern Ireland’s major Protestant brotherhood urged their followers to refrain from violence Sunday after British security forces blocked their most controversial parade for the fourth year in a row.
“I appeal for peace and quiet in the coming days,” the Orange Order leader in Portadown, Harold Gracey, told about 2,000 Protestants who marched to a high steel barricade that prevented them from parading through the town’s Catholic district, Garvaghy Road.
Most Orangemen went home after hearing Mr. Gracey’s speech, leaving a few hundred sullen-faced men staring at the barbed-wire fences and watery ditches separating them from units of soldiers and riot police.
Police and politicians predicted militant Protestants would mount few attacks in the tense buildup to other Orange Order parades this week, many of which have been barred from Catholic turf.
The confrontational Orange Order marches this week coincide with a crisis threatening Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord and particularly the joint Catholic-Protestant government it produced. Protestant leaders have warned that they will scuttle the coalition within weeks unless the Irish Republican Army starts to scrap weapons, as promised last year.
Gerry Adams, leader of the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party, said Sunday that there was “no possibility” that the IRA would hand over weapons unless Protestant parties and Britain move on police reform and troop reductions.
“The IRA are not sheep,” Mr. Adams said at a rally in West Belfast.
On Monday, the British and Irish prime ministers, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, were expected to lead a secretive round of negotiations among Northern Irish parties at an isolated English mansion. Mr. Blair and Mr. Ahern, who want a new deal by Tuesday night, welcomed the Orange Order’s appeals against violence.
But many rank-and-file Orangemen lamented that their hard-line organization – once a dominant social force in this Protestant-majority province – appeared rudderless and unable to get its way anymore.
“We’re crying out for firm leadership. But our leaders have no strategy. We just do the same stupid thing year after year. I don’t think we’ll ever get down Garvaghy Road again unless we totally humiliate ourselves,” said Joe Anderson, an Orangeman and a former British soldier.
A wide array of religious and political leaders have appealed for the Orange Order to follow the example of Northern Ireland’s wider peace process and enter direct negotiations with Garvaghy Road’s Catholic leaders.
But Mr. Gracey and other Orange leaders said Sunday that they had no plans to talk to Catholic protesters or to a government-appointed Parades Commission, which has imposed restrictions on their traditional July marches. They vowed instead to maintain token protests near the barricade indefinitely, their tactic since 1998.
“We will continue to do so until our civil and religious liberties have been restored and we walk the Garvaghy Road,” the order’s Portadown secretary, Nigel Dawson, told police officers at the barricade. He asked them to remove “this obscene obstruction.”
