GARVAGHY Road residents and their supporters will be back at the High Court in Belfast on Saturday morning when a legal challenge will be heard against today’s Parades Commission decision to permit an Orange Order march though the Nationalist district of Portadown on Sunday morning.

There has not been an Orange Order march from Drumcree Church to Portadown town centre through Garvaghy Road in 28 years.

Speaking this evening outside the High Court after a legal challenge against the decision was made, Breandán Mac Cionnaith from the Garvaghy Road Residents' Coalition said the Parades Commission decision this afternoon “came as a complete shock to our community in Portadown”.
 
Speaking to a large crowd of supporters, he said: “There will never be any justification for it in our eyes, because at the end of the day our community went through enough in the 1990s.
 
"Between 1996 and 1999, 21 people lost their lives at the hands of those acting on behalf of the Orange Order at Drumcree. 21 people, 21 deaths, 21 families.”
 
He added: Everyone of those deaths, everyone of those murders, impacted deeply on our community. For somehow or other we felt that we were to blame for standing up for our rights that those people had to die. So when we go into this court tomorrow it’s not just about our community now that we are thinking about, we are going in there on behalf of those 21 families who lost their lives at the hands of loyalists.

"And as for the Orange Order, we don't need to rehearse the history. When one associates the Orange Order with Drumcree it's worth to remember that at the first recorded Orange church service at Drumcree, in the immediate aftermath those leaving the service went down Drumcree Road and there were two young Catholic men working in a field and they were beaten to death.

"The Drumcree march started with murder and it ended with murder and that's where it should be allowed to end. It should never be repeated again."