NATIONALIST residents on the Garvaghy Road have described Orange Order proposals to complete a banned parade through the area as “absurd”.
The comments came after the order said that it had enlisted the help of a senior Catholic priest to try and secure talks with nationalist residents.
Orangemen have been holding regular protests at Drumcree since they were banned from walking along the road in 1998.
In that year three Catholic children, Jason (8) Mark (9) and Richard (10) Quinn died after loyalists who were sympathetic to the Orange Order petrol bombed their Ballymoney home at the height of the Drumcree dispute.
The dispute, which began in 1995, sparked violent scenes across the north in subsequent years after the RUC forcefully removed protesting nationalists from the road to facilitate the Orange Order march from Drumcree Church to Portadown town centre.
Portadown District Master Darryl Hewitt said that attempts to talk to residents were made in 2014 through a Catholic priest..
For years the Orange Order had refused to speak to residents.
Mr Hewitt last week said “everything is on the table” when it comes to future parades but insisted the 1998 parade must be completed.
He explained the process involving the Catholic priest eventually came to nothing with the clergyman urging them to approach the Church of Ireland primate.
The claim Archbishop Richard Clarke later agreed to co-chair a process and that last year Catholic Archbishop Eamon Martin also agreed to appoint a joint talks chair if residents were in favour.
In a statement the Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition said insistence on finishing the 1998 parade “demonstrates complete disregard for the views of those who would be most directly affected – residents of the area and their families”.
The spokesman said a generation of young nationalists know nothing of the dispute.
“Since 1998, and particularly from the start of this millennium, the rerouting of contentious marches away from the Garvaghy Road by the Parades Commission has meant that our community – and the wider community – has enjoyed successive peaceful summers,” the statement said.
“An entire generation of young people has grown up and reached adulthood without having to experience the humiliation and fear, tension and violence, or the physical sieges that accompanied those unwanted sectarian marches of the mid- and late 1990’s through this community.
“Residents in our neighbourhoods now enjoy family and community life in relative peace and tranquillity.
“Our community has moved on, Portadown District needs to do likewise.”
The statement said demands to complete the 1998 parade lack sensitivity.
“Demanding to complete the 1998 parade is not only completely absurd, it is also highly insensitive and demonstrates a continued refusal by the Orange Order to assume any responsibility for the violent events associated with Drumcree in the 1990’s,” it said.
“The Orange Order's parade of July 1998 is in the past. It is over.
“That parade along Garvaghy Road was found to be totally unjustifiable eighteen years ago.
“Such a parade has not been justifiable in any of the intervening years since.”