“It’s Not Our Children and Their Children, They’re All Our Children”; Who Gets to Speak About the Garvaghy Road?

By Owen Nugent

Passages from interviews have been edited for clarity 

My earliest years of adolescent independence were coloured by a striking mural I knew little about. On the Ormeau Road is a depiction of a situation between the Orange Order and Parades Commission, an anxious man with shaky hands offering lower Ormeau in a ‘trade off’ with the member, who held a bludgeon labelled Drumcree sternly saying ‘stand off.’ In those days I was young, but smart enough to figure that this might have been some relic of the Troubles, a minor nothing that I need never worry about. The recent avalanche that has iced over our political and daily conversations has forced me and many others to reckon otherwise. I know the Ormeau road well, it was the artery of a healthy teenage social life for me. A thoroughfare no doubt familiar to all students of Queen’s, the home of the Hatfield house, the original Phin coffee and Al Gelato, it’s not a bad place to be. But Drumcree and the Garvaghy road never crossed my path. How many people talking about it at the dinner table, the break room at work, in between lectures and tutorials have actually been? I decided to make my way there, with no ties or concrete knowledge on the lay of the land, but adamant to hear the reality that has more impact to these people than the headlines and summaries that we have to parse through as this situation is unceasing in its evolution. 

To us, presumably as people born in the 2000s, this was assumed to be just history. History only in the sense that it occupies a few pages or lines of text in a book, if even. I have a friend from Portadown, and the issue to him seemed as fuzzy as the skin on a peach. I’m hinting at the fact that we as young people haven’t lived through the original dispute over marching on this road, nor do we know the people that were there for that. They are still alive. Still the same children that had to move to the Garvaghy road as they were forced out of somewhere else in Portadown. In my going to this road, it is their story I wanted to know more about. 

Arriving in Portadown, I was greeted with a sunshine that would forgive you for thinking it was Midsummer. The breeze was pleasant, and carrying with it the colours and mottos of various flags that lined this road. Contrary to the images of a road blocked with throngs of residents, friends and supporters, traffic was happy to make its way along, and only as you made your way up the incline could you spot a marquee and a group of the most committed locals. For the most part, people were sat on the pavement, in chairs or on their coats, making polite conversation with each other. I asked about to find out where I could find a representative, spokesperson or other, figuring what motivated people to come here. One couple I spoke to had come over from Lurgan and told me of their memories of the marches, which also took place there. When I asked if he knew people from the Garvaghy road personally, he told me of a woman he knew with recent cancer complications, undergoing treatment, but was still able to make her way out on the road on Monday, hopefully with a good coat for warmth. “That’s the depth of feeling, you know what I mean?” 

A few minutes down the hill and into a side street brought me to a community center, and the weather still being pleasantly felt. By now, the school day was coming to a close, and the building was populated with pinafores and school jumpers getting up to the usual mischief that we find so often in primary school children. Stepping inside I was greeted with the familiar sight of fold up tables, plastic chairs, a healthy spread of sandwiches, biscuits, and tankards of coffee and tea that my local community center couldn’t be seen without. I waited at the entrance for someone to speak to, and we sat ourselves outside in the shade. It quickly became apparent that I was talking to someone who was immensely proud of where they lived, and proud of the progress that the younger generations were making. “They’re going up the town with their mates from the other side of town, their friends all hang about together… all playing soccer together, all socialising in the bars up the town, marrying each other. That’s how much we’ve moved on in 28 years,” I was told. 

The lack of parades, the Good Friday Agreement, in general the want of any need to relitigate these rituals has allowed the younger generations in Portadown to get on with their lives, and to focus on the things everyone engages in. When the decision was made to pursue a march down this road, then, the concerns from the young were on how this status quo would change. “A young fella came in here the first night at the meeting about the petition, and he said, ‘will I not be able to play football for the team anymore?’” This was an example of that concern that I was given. Others that I spoke to of this generation had like concerns, and the underlying desire for these people, of all ages, is to be able to see the end of this stand-off and to get on with their lives without the worries that have preoccupied their days and nights. “Your stomach goes like a washing machine… The trauma that came out that you didn’t even know you had, in the three weeks coming up to this the people in this community were so so anxious.” 

Given the history of disputes like this being on sectarian questions, it might be easy to fall into familiar patterns of assuming this exists as a proxy issue between Catholic and Protestant communities, and that the concerns that surround Drumcree are wholly to be thought of on these issues. This might have been an easy shorthand a generation ago, but it fails to capture the extent to which reconciliation has been sought and attained from all sides. Recently, an open letter has circulated calling for an end to this crisis, signed by people brought up in the Protestant faith, which has helped to highlight the need to update the underlying logic we work within on a matter like this. “It’s not our children and their children, they’re all our children.” 

Leaving Portadown, the last moment to leave an impression in my memory was that of reunion. A grandfather and grandchild holding each other, unbothered smiles that were focused on other things, under the sun whose heat held firm over the skies on this afternoon.