Extra troops swell guard for Orangemen march

By ANNE McHARDY Herald correspondent

BELFAST - Extra soldiers were flown into Northern Ireland over the weekend in readiness for today's Orange Order parade in Portadown to Drumcree Church, scene of repeated sectarian violence in the past decade.

More than 2000 police and soldiers were on standby even though Assistant Chief Constable Stephen White, overseeing security for the march, said he expected no violence when police stop the parade near the Garvaghy Rd.

Yesterday British Army engineers lifted heavy concrete blocks on to a narrow bridge outside a rural Anglican church, which is the focal point for the parade.

White said his forces also could quickly erect more formidable steel-wall barriers and deploy water cannons.

This year, as for the past five years, the Northern Ireland Parades Commission has banned the Protestant Orangemen from marching along the Garvaghy Rd, through a Catholic housing estate, along what Protestants claim is a traditional route.

The point at which the parade has been halted has been the focal point for the worst violence of the Orange marching season, which culminates next week with huge parades, the biggest in Belfast.

Northern Ireland is denuded of a significant section of its population each year during the marching season.

Catholics habitually take holidays, many crossing the border into the Irish Republic, as do Protestants who want to distance themselves from their more bigoted co-religionists.

On Friday the British and Irish Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, chaired discussions at Hillsborough Castle, just outside Belfast, in an attempt to reduce the summer tension and also to rescue the peace process.

The Unionists are demanding British Government sanctions against Sinn Fein, because there has not been a third IRA decommissioning of weapons.

The Northern Ireland First Minister, Unionist Party leader David Trimble, called for action from both Governments.

The two Prime Ministers retaliated by saying the peace process had to be rescued.

Six years ago Trimble, before he was First Minister, marched with the Orangemen at Drumcree, walking with his arch-rival for Unionist votes, the Rev Ian Paisley.

The most notorious of the Protestant extremists, Johnny Adair, a Loyalist paramilitary prisoner who was released on licence as part of the peace process under the Good Friday agreement, then returned to prison after the riots at Drumcree three years ago and released again six months ago, said in a weekend radio interview that he now supported the peace process and was advising his followers not to go to Drumcree.

Adair said he did not like much of the Good Friday agreement but still believed the process must be supported.

Drumcree today and the marches on July 12 will test what support for peace means in Adair's terms.