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Loyalist protestors plan to isolate Garvaghy Road

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Anne Cadwallader

BELFAST — Loyalists in Portadown, who have already applied to march every day from July 2 onward, are planning to seal off the nationalist Garvaghy Road area during this year’s July 9 Drumcree protest to bring maximum pressure on the RUC in the run-up to the annual Twelfth parades.

Loyalists have held meetings throughout Portadown over the last week to begin planning tactics for this year’s showdown at the hill at Drumcree church.

As many as 100 U.S. observers are expected in Portadown this year, with some arriving early in July and some later to be sure that international witnesses will be present during the height of the dangerous and tense weeks to come in the town.

Tensions are already rising in Portadown and elsewhere, with three Catholic chapels having been attacked within the past week. Fires were set at churches in Portadown itself, the Lower Ormeau area of Belfast and in the village of Cushendall in the Glens of Antrim.

Two of the chapels serve nationalist communities that have protested at previous loyalist marches over past years, but the third area, Cushendall, is a quiet country village that has escaped the worst of the Troubles.

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The loyalists’ plans will present a security nightmare for the RUC and British Army, which had hoped to contain the protests to a four-day period between July 9 and 12. Now they have to face the prospect of nearly two weeks working at full stretch.

Loyalists are also planning to put pressure on individual RUC men’s families, as they did in 1998, when they held photographs of RUC men’s houses, wives and children in front of them along the trenches and barbed wire fences in fields close to the church. They may even picket police officers’ homes.

The assembly and dispersal points for the daily marches to and from Drumcree church is to be a loyalist street close to the Craigwell Avenue flashpoint and where a new peace line had to be built to protect Catholic housing at Obins Street.

This gives maximum potential for violence before and after marches, as loyalists gather and disperse at what is expected to be a tense time. Hardliners are said to be furious that their moderate stand of last year has failed to produce the intended result, an approved march down the nationalist Garvaghy Road.

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