A STAND-OFF in Northern Ireland has continued through the day and into the evening, with Orangemen waiting at Drumcree Church around a mile from the road waiting to commence their march.
The order came as thousands of protesters continue to blockade the predominately nationalist Garvaghy Road in Portadown in a bid to prevent a contentious Orange Order march passing.
The Drumcree parade, which was associated with violent clashes during the Troubles, has been banned since 1998.
Protesters, many of them wearing balaclavas, clustered in large groups in heavy rain along the road on Sunday morning, a move that delayed the scheduled 8am start of the parade.
At around 6pm, several Orangemen emerged from the church hall and walked down the hill where they were met by police.
Officers subsequently told senior members of the institution that they could not have more than 35 people on the hill – as that was a restriction placed on the parade by the commission.
The escalating political row over the march testing the stability of the powersharing institutions in Belfast.
DUP leader Gavin Robinson was asked whether he was prepared to continue to work with Sinn Féin. If either the DUP or Sinn Féin withdrew from the executive, the devolved government would effectively collapse.
Earlier, Sinn Féin vice-president Michelle O’Neill told reporters on the Garvaghy Road that the reignition of the Drumcree dispute “brings into question how this whole peace process works”.
Party president Mary Lou McDonald called on Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Bryant to intervene to ban the parade.
She said the people of the Garvaghy Road would “not be drawn back to the past”.
The Northern Ireland Secretary has the power to ban the parade if Northern Ireland’s police chief requests such a step citing concerns over the potential for public disorder.
Bryant flew into Northern Ireland on Sunday from the Labour Party conference in Liverpool to have discussions with political leaders as
Speaking to reporters in Belfast, Bryant said “nobody wants to go back 28 years”.
“The whole idea of us coming here is to be able to try and be able to talk specifically face to face to some of the political leaders and some of the community leaders to see if we can get to a settled position,” he said.
“The truth is everybody has to double down on compromise – that’s what life’s all about – double down on compromise.”
Police Service of Northern Ireland chief constable Jon Boutcher called for people come together to try to get past their issues.
He said the police operation thus far had involved evidence-gathering of “whatever has been happening from whatever party”.
“I am hoping we will bring all of today’s events to a sensible and peaceful conclusion,” he said.
On what a successful conclusion may look like, he added: “There has got to be a longer-term conversation which involves politicians and the people involved in what we have seen in the last 24 hours, trying to find a space that they can resolve these issues.”
There had been many “sensible voices” calling for calm which he thought had been “listened to by all parties”.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has appealed for “calm on all sides”, saying there have been “big gains made in Northern Ireland, and we don’t want to see things go backwards”.
Taoiseach Micheál Martin also urged calm as he expressed concern about the situation.
Martin also described the decision by the Parades Commission to allow a parade to go down the Garvaghy Road for the first time in nearly three decades as “incomprehensible and wrong”.
The parade was finally given the go ahead at a hearing which concluded at 2.15am on Sunday after opposing legal teams outlined their arguments over the controversial parade.
The hearing was one of three separate emergency legal challenges before the courts in Belfast across Saturday and into early Sunday.
