‘Reviving the Garvaghy Road route for an Orange Order parade after 28 years, when it was a focal point of lethal violence back in the 1990s, looks like a bid to take us backwards too’
Page B1From§Eachthe midnight edition — 28 September 2026
Belfast judge clears first Garvaghy Road march in 28 years, city marches out to stop it instead
As it ran on the front
Twenty-eight years is the number in today's receipts, and twenty-eight years back from Sunday lands on 1998, the year Northern Ireland signed the Good Friday Agreement. The record does not say the agreement itself wrote a ban on marching Garvaghy Road into law. It says only that the march stopped that year in Portadown and, for the length of a generation, nobody tried to bring it back. That is the thing being buried today — not a parade, not a protest, but twenty-eight years of a fight nobody picked.
In 2011, Queen Elizabeth II made the first state visit to the Republic of Ireland since Irish independence in 1921. In 2021, the European Union told the United Kingdom no, it would not renegotiate the Brexit trade terms it had accepted for Northern Ireland, warning that unwinding the deal would bring "instability, uncertainty and unpredictability." In 2022, Sinn Féin took the most seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the first time since partition, 29 percent of first-preference votes, the first unionist runner-up finish in the Assembly's history. Three governments' worth of business got settled across those years, in Belfast, in London, in Brussels. None of it was Garvaghy Road. The road was not an issue anyone was working. It was just closed, the way a road is closed when everyone has agreed, without saying so, to drive around it.…
…(cont) On Sunday that changed. A High Court judge in Belfast, in a late-night sitting, cleared the Orange Order to march the route this year. Prime Minister Andy Burnham called for calm, which is what a prime minister says when a court has just handed him a live one. Thousands of people in Portadown, a town where sentiment runs toward unification with the Republic, treated the ruling as a start rather than an end and blocked the road themselves, standing between the marchers and the route the court had just reopened. The Orange Order supports Northern Ireland's place in the United Kingdom; Garvaghy Road, per the record, was a focal point of lethal violence in the 1990s. That is the memory the order reopened, whether the judge meant to reopen it or not.
A court order is a page of law with a date on it. That is what did not survive Sunday's sitting: not the peace, which the receipts do not say ended, but the plain fact of not marching there, the one habit that had outlasted a Brexit fight, a royal visit, and an election that flipped the Assembly for the first time in a century.
The taboo against marching Garvaghy Road was born in 1998, the year of the Good Friday Agreement. It is survived by a High Court order handed down in a late-night sitting. It was preceded in death by twenty-eight years in which the march did not happen. In lieu of flowers, the route stays closed.
“Twenty-eight years of not walking down one street in Portadown is what peace looked like on the ground, and it took one judge, one late-night sitting, to decide that didn't count for anything anymore. Nobody voted on that. A courtroom did it after midnight, and the only people who showed up to argue back were the ones who walked out and stood in the road themselves.”
“Look, a court found the Orange Order has a legal right to walk down a public road, that's — that's just what courts do, they apply the law as written, nobody's reviving a grievance, they're enforcing a ruling. The twenty-eight years thing, that's not a legal standard, that's just — habit, and habit isn't a defense in a courtroom. Did I just call the peace process a habit? That's not — let me rephrase that.”
Earlier in this story
- Labour conference arrests hundreds for backing banned group, hears fascism must be organized against, same day. By Sal · the late evening edition, 27 September 2026
The receipts
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham called for calm in Northern Ireland on Sunday after the Orange Order was given the go-ahead by the High Court in Belfast in a late-night sitting.
BRITISH Prime Minister Andy Burnham called for calm in Northern Ireland today after a contentious parade was given the green light by the High Court in Belfast in a late-night sitting. Thousands of protesters gathered to block the marchers from the Orange Order, a group supportive of Northern Ireland being part of Britain, from…
· Irish republican party Sinn Féin win the most seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly with 29% of the first-preference vote, marking the first time that a unionist party did not win the most seats sinc from the morgue, 7 May 2022
· Queen Elizabeth II starts her first state visit to the Republic of Ireland, the first visit of a British monarch since Ireland's independence from the United Kingdom in 1921. Elizabeth is also the fir from the morgue, 17 May 2011
· The European Union rejects a request from the United Kingdom to renegotiate the deal governing the trading position of Northern Ireland. The EU adds that renegotiating the deal, which agreed to leave from the morgue, 10 Sep 2021
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.