Crowds gathered along Garvaghy Road in Portadown on Sunday morning ahead of the Orange Order parade scheduled for 8am. A late-night High Court hearing, ending at about 2.15am, upheld the Parades Commission’s decision permitting the march.
The hearing began at 12.20am before Justice Michael Humphreys. He described the circumstances as unusual and said courts should respect a public body’s reasoned decision after it has considered relevant evidence. Judicial intervention, he said, is limited to cases where no reasonable authority could have reached that conclusion; the court could not substitute its own view for the commission’s.
The ruling followed a fast-moving sequence of challenges. On Saturday afternoon, Justice Patricia Smyth paused the effect of the parade notification, citing the risk that the long-running dispute could escalate. The Orange Order appealed. A Court of Appeal panel comprising Lady Chief Justice Siobhan Keegan, Justice Humphreys and Lady Justice Denise McBride upheld Portadown Orangeman Alan Hynes’s appeal, and the case returned to the High Court for a further hearing.
Residents’ counsel questioned whether the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s threat assessment addressed future risks or focused only on past incidents. Hynes’s legal team argued that the case concerned minority rights and the right to lawful assembly. The Parades Commission warned against repeatedly bringing its determinations back before the courts.
The Drumcree route has been a flashpoint since the 1990s, when nationalist residents opposed the march through their area and summer clashes fuelled political tension and major security operations. The Orange Order had sought for more than 25 years to complete its traditional Garvaghy Road route, dating to 1998.