“Are you okay, nanny?” says a young woman as she holds an umbrella over her grandmother’s head. It’s five o’clock in the morning on the Garvaghy Road. The grandmother, wrapped in a puffy coat, sits in a deckchair on the footpath. They are two of hundreds of Garvaghy residents and supporters who have formed a barricade to stop the Orange Order from marching into their community. All around them are reminders of the dark days, the murdered Quinn children and Darren Murray. The assassination of Rosemary Nelson and all the others who lost their lives in the Drumcree Dispute of the 1990s.
As the Garvaghy Standoff spills into its second week, negotiations have reached a predictable stalemate with the seemingly unstoppable force of Orange triumphalism colliding with the immovable object of the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition (GRRC). However, following yesterday’s 15,000-strong rally in support of the residents, which follows a week of celebrity endorsement and widespread national and international support, most won’t need a court to tell them which side has won.
Along the Garvaghy Road, the frayed strands of Republicanism were joined. Every corner of the Nationalist umbrella worth its salt got a look in at some stage of the Garvaghy Standoff. Last week, members of the Policing Board linked arms with anti-agreement Republicans and faced down PSNI warnings of convictions. And yesterday afternoon, nationalists packed the top of the Garvaghy Road and applauded speakers from across the republican pantheon. In the words of prominent anti-agreement Republican, Frankie Quinn, “Thank you very much, Mr. Bryson, you have united Republicanism and nationalism, something that nobody has done for years, so good man yourself”.
While the women at the Drumcree Community Centre worked overtime producing trays of sandwiches, and musicians played to gaggles of cheery supporters, a short distance away, the tirades of Jim Allistair and Carla Lockhart boomed through a PA, emanating over the peace wall like the sectarian stench of an old ideology well past its sell-by date. At the foot of Drumcree, people pose for selfies at the police line, while distant orangemen gathered on the hill act as exhibits in an open-air museum of the past, not a serious force in modern Irish politics.
Compared with the ‘Let Them Home Festival’, a sparsely attended Loyalist counter-rally that felt more like a flagging neighbourhood barbecue than a fiery political mobilisation, the Garvaghy looked like Woodstock. The booming of Lambegs and Ian Paisley impressions from the stage could not hide the tiny attendance around it – and as the TUV found out, neither could generative AI. One thing is clear: even though Republicanism has not yet emerged victorious from this battle, Unionism has undoubtedly already lost it.
In the 90s, Loyalism had the RUC and Army to drag the residents off the road. In 2026, the PSNI has taken a far more apathetic stance, with disinterested officers telling the marchers, over and over again, to walk back up the hill. Despite protestations from the likes of Carla Lockhart, who has called for the PSNI to do their job under threat of plunging the North into the “abyss”, it’s self-evident that Jon Boutcher would not dare to use force to disperse the residents and their supporters.
The Orange Order is exposed up on the hill of Drumcree. The group has benefited from the sectarian detente of power-sharing, with their deeply divisive traditions having been transmogrified into eccentric parades or cartoonish motifs of sectarianism in shows like Derry Girls or the Kneecap movie, if noticed at all by the general public in the Republic and Britain. Now, however, Jamie Bryson has led them by the nose into the light, and like sashed-silverfish they have found themselves wriggling under unprecedented online scrutiny. Rather than galvanising Loyalism, Bryson’s Orange Alamo has inadvertently introduced a social media-savvy generation to the level of supremacist hatred and trauma the group and its supporters have meted out on communities in the North.
Thanks to the incredible resolve of the Garvaghy residents, the willingness to collaborate with Republicans island-wide, the notoriously stubborn nature of Breandán Mac Cionnaith, and the buffoonish political performance from Jamie Bryson and Carla Lockhart, the hyper-obstinate group has been driven to the negotiating table, now bargaining that they’ll never do it again if they’re allowed one last march.
The old woman takes a cup of tea from a group of women who have gathered to chat. In her life, a wave of Orangism crashed over her community, a tsunami of psychopathic loyalist violence and hate that saw the people of the Garvaghy Road bowled over. But now, as that orange tide comes in again, it doesn’t so much as move her deckchair; it doesn’t give a second’s pause to the women preparing food in the community centre, or the chattering attendees gathered along the road. She’s lived in fear of Orange hate for time enough. For her granddaughter, she wants more, and she’s prepared to sit on the road all night in the pissing rain to ensure she gets it. From her and thousands like her, the message is clear: The Sash will not go down Garvaghy Road.
