UK: N.IRELAND:ORANGE ORDER PROTEST2

Описание: (10 Jul 2000) English/Nat
XFA
Protestant hard-liners have mounted street protests, forcing town centres to close early and inspiring more violence across Northern Ireland after the British government restricted their traditional July parades.

Leaders of the Orange Order brotherhood insisted they were counselling supporters not to destroy property or attack police after Monday's planned four-hour human road blockades.

Orange Order leaders in Northern Ireland have vowed to mount a second week of street protests if the Protestant brotherhood isn't permitted to parade through Portadown's main Catholic neighborhood.

Loyalists in Northern Ireland on Monday were continuing to demonstrate despite the official end of the protest.

Threats of Orange Order street protest planned from mid-afternoon to midnight was enough to empty streets in the main city of Belfast.

Further outside the center groups of loyalists had set up barricades on main arterial roads.

The effects was to turn the city of Belfast into a ghost town.

SOUNDBITE: (English)
"As I was walking down the street everyone disappeared. I thought 'what's wrong with me? Why Is everyone running away?"
SUPER CAPTION: Vox Pop

The mounting tensions come in advance of massive parades in Wednesday, when the Orange Order commemorates a military triumph over Catholics as long ago as 1690.

The annual collision of rights at Portadown - where Orangemen insist they have the right to free assembly, Catholic residents to live free of sectarian harassment - has defied solution for years.

It has triggered widespread violence regardless of whether security forces blocked the parade or forced it through.

SOUNDBITE: (English
"The issue will not be resolved by violence or the threat of violence. On that point I hope very much that people today and in succeeding days will be calm and peaceful; that there will be no violence whatsoever. I have to say to anybody who does resort to violence over the course of the next day or two that they are aiding no cause, no cause at all. And they will only bring dishonour and disgrace to the cause they profess to support."
SUPER CAPTION: David Trimble, Northern Ireland First Minister

Since its formation in 1998 a government-appointed Parades Commission has ordered Portadown Orangemen to stay away from Garvaghy Road.

SOUNDBITE: (English)
"I think Orangemen always act in a very peaceful manner so they do. That has been proved time and time again, so it has, but when one gets into the issue of condemnation and such like I think that is a very simplistic approach to a very complex problem, so it is. I think it is actually a very easy situation for archbishops, for politicians and all the leading gentry of the community to call for condemnation and then they can wash their hands and walk away from the issue."
SUPER CAPTION: Noel Ligget, Ormeau Orange man

The Orange Order, however, has refused to meet Garvaghy Road residents since Catholic militants there began blocking the annual parade in 1995.

Orangemen cite the I-R-A background of the Catholic protest leader, Breandan MacCionnaith, as justification for rejecting direct talks.

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