‘Trauma still there’: A decades-old standoff returns to Northern Ireland

Portadown, Northern Ireland – When the summer holidays arrived, Chris Nelson worried about his mother.

At night, he lay awake waiting for her to return. During the day, he rang family members to ask if she was safe. There were threats and letters through the door.

“I was afraid to leave the house,” he told Al Jazeera.

His mother, Rosemary Nelson, was a lawyer representing the Catholic residents opposing the Protestant Orange Order parade along Portadown’s Garvaghy Road in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s.

Every July, as marching season approached, there was a standoff.

Orangemen sought to return from Drumcree church along what they regarded as their traditional route. Residents opposed the passage of the anti-Catholic organisation through a majority Catholic street. In some years, police forced the parade through. In later years, it was blocked.

Rosemary would spend summer evenings alongside the residents on Garvaghy Road. Before leaving home each evening, she told her son that she was going to look after families and make sure their children were okay. She compared them to his friends at primary school.

“She was a big believer in helping the underdog,” said Chris, now 39. “She did a lot of work for free.”

His mother helped people from both sides of the community. When work allowed, the family went to Bundoran, across the border, and for a day the fear would pass.

But one night, during a standoff in 1997 when the state police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), used batons to clear Catholic locals from the road, “she was beaten by the police”, said Chris. “She was spat on”, bruised and bloodied.

“That was very traumatic. I was always thinking something was going to happen to my mum.”

On a Monday in March 1999, nearly a year after the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to the conflict, Rosemary drove away from her home in Lurgan.

As she braked at a nearby junction, a bomb beneath her car exploded. Her eight-year-old daughter, Sarah, was at primary school nearby and heard the blast. The family had spent the previous weekend in Bundoran together.

Chris, 11 at the time, and his older brother were away on a school ski trip when they received a phone call with the news of her death.

“That was hard”, he said, his voice tailing off.

Nearly three decades later, another standoff has recast these childhood memories into fears for the next generation, with a renewed attempt by the Protestant Orange Order to march through the Catholic neighbourhood, threatening to unravel a fragile peace.

The Troubles began in the late 1960s as protests by Catholics against discrimination were met by repression and violence. Republican paramilitaries fought for a united Ireland as loyalists and the army battled to preserve British rule, in a conflict that killed more than 3,500 people.

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement established a framework for peace and power-sharing.

Under the agreement, the people of Portadown have lived in relative peace for the past 28 years.

But this was suddenly unsettled by a last-minute decision by the High Court to allow the march. In response, Catholic residents blocked the road. Many camped out as Orange men gathered at the top of the road, awaiting police permission to pass – an image of division that never truly left.

Many of the Garvaghy Road residents are now parents, and fear what their children might inherit from a dispute they hoped had been left behind.

Paul O’Connor, of the Pat Finucane Centre human rights group in Northern Ireland, said Rosemary Nelson is among 21 people whose deaths were linked to the Drumcree dispute.

Many are still being investigated, with families continuing to seek justice and pressing for public inquiries amid concerns about collusion between the British state and loyalist paramilitaries, many of which were members of the Orange Order.

“These murders encompass LVF (Loyal Volunteer Force) killings at that time, and are all linked to the Drumcree disputes. They were responsible for many of the killings around the Mid Ulster area at that time. They were trying to destabilise the peace process, with many riots spreading around, including into Derry,” O’Connor told Al Jazeera.

He worked with Rosemary Nelson and is now seeking a public inquiry into the murder of Sean Brown, another Drumcree-linked case, he believes. The 61-year-old father of six from Bellaghy, County Derry, was abducted and murdered in May 1997.

The following year, the three Quinn brothers – Richard, 10, Mark, nine, and Jason, eight – died after loyalists petrol-bombed their home in Ballymoney, County Antrim, as they slept. Their deaths, during the unrest surrounding Drumcree, brought widespread calls for the Orange Order to end its standoff.

In Portadown town centre, a Union flag flies among plinths dedicated to the Ulster Defence Regiment, a locally recruited unit of the British army and the Ulster Covenant – a document signed when nearly 500,000 people opposed a form of self-government for Ireland in 1912.

Around the corner, in the Edgarstown housing estate, Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) flags hang from lampposts, and the kerbs are painted red, white and blue, alongside a mural of a Rangers FC badge.

The area is one of the heartlands of unionism. The Orange Order was founded in 1795 in the village of Loughgall, a few miles from Drumcree.

The Orangemen say they have marched the route through Garvaghy Road since 1807. The parade has been blocked from Garvaghy Road since 1998, but the Orangemen have continued submitting requests to march.

The latest Parades Commission decision permitted 35 men to walk without music. Since then, Orangemen have repeatedly approached the police line before returning to the church.

Irish nationalists have criticised the police assessment underpinning the decision to allow the march, while unionists have denounced police for failing to forcibly remove protesters blocking the route.

Al Jazeera contacted the three main unionist parties – the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) – for comment but received no response.

Addressing around 200 supporters in Portadown, loyalist activist Jamie Bryson described protesters as “an unlawful snarling mob”.

He has called for the First Minister, Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill, and police Chief Constable Jon Boutcher to resign, and demands that the Orange men must be allowed to walk the Garvaghy Road.

O’Neill has faced criticism for standing beside the protesters.

At Drumcree Church, the Orangemen were not marching, but sitting down drinking tea and eating crisps. Around six men, one wearing his sash, huddled under a gazebo in the cold.

“We are waiting patiently for the chief constable to apply the law of the land,” Nigel Dawson, the Portadown Orange Order district master, told Al Jazeera.

“Portadown District has never in its history stopped a parade down the road to have a confrontation with its neighbours, ever. So I don’t know where the fear and trepidation comes from.”

Another Orangeman, who requested anonymity, added: “We are determined to get home after Sunday service … We just want to go home.”

Around a mile further down the Garvaghy Road, Irish folk band the Mary Wallopers performed to hundreds of residents and supporters.

Children danced and slid down the embankment, as parents watched from above. Palestine and Ireland flags flew in the wind.

Linda O’Neill, 51, a Garvaghy Road resident, told Al Jazeera the scene would have been unimaginable 30 years ago.

“It was horrendous growing up as a teenager. We stayed in our own community. We didn’t access the town centre … This community was a ghetto. And that was deliberate.”

Another resident, Ciaran O Ferghail, remembered summers spent surrounded by British forces.

“This community was turned into a war zone. There were tanks and British Army everywhere, thousands of RUC. This community was completely under siege every summer, by the Orange Order, the British military, the RUC and loyalist paramilitaries. We were surrounded on every road and in every direction.”

O’Neill said the confrontation changed as residents began asserting their rights.

In 1995, hundreds sat down on Garvaghy Road to block the parade. The ensuing violent standoff between security forces and Orangemen and their loyalist supporters ended in a compromise allowing the march through. Residents say they understood it would be the last.

But the following summer, the parade returned. Police initially blocked it, then reversed course after five days of widespread loyalist attacks. Officers forced residents off the road and beat them, sparking riots in Catholic communities.

In 1997, security forces sealed off the Catholic neighbourhood before dawn and allowed the parade through at midday amid loyalist threats to kill Catholics if it was stopped. Nationalist protests and violence followed. From 1998, the march was banned from Garvaghy Road. But for residents, summers remained marked by the army’s steel barricades until 2000.

Chris Nelson, almost 40, is around the same age his mother was when she was killed.

The Garvaghy Road protests mark the first time he has chosen to speak publicly about his mother.

He went on to study law at university, but says his life would have followed a different trajectory if she were still here.

The public inquiry into his mother’s death found no evidence that state security agencies had “directly facilitated” her murder, but it “could not exclude the possibility” that individual members of those agencies had helped the perpetrators.

The inquiry brought the past back repeatedly as he tried to get on with his life. But seeing photographs of families linking arms on Garvaghy Road brought back unavoidable memories of his mother.

“If she were here, that’s where she would be,” he said, “standing with the people of the Garvaghy Road”.

While there has been no violence in Portadown, in Derry’s Waterside, two recent nights of disorder saw petrol bombs and masonry thrown at police. Officers described the crowd on the second night as mostly young people.

The renewed attempt to bring the Orange Order parade through Garvaghy Road risks leaving its mark on children on both sides. With some schools closed, Chris Nelson worries about parents having to explain to their kids what is happening.

“Children don’t forget things“, he said. “They absorb everything.”

He remembers how it felt waiting for his mother each night, and how that worry followed him through the summer holidays. He wants something different for the children growing up now.

“Children shouldn’t grow up knowing the difference between Catholic and Protestant.

“It isn’t something that should be brought into the mind of a child.”