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Orange march OK angers Lower Ormeau residents

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Anne Cadwallader

BELFAST — Nationalist residents on the Lower Ormeau Road are planning to appeal at republican Easter rallies throughout the country on Sunday for mass support in resisting Monday’s planned Apprentice Boys march through their area.

Northern Ireland’s Parades Commission on Friday declined to reroute the parade. But there are some conditions. For example, the Apprentice Boys must march at 8:20 a.m. and without bands and followers, all dramatic departures from previous marches.

Posters and leaflets are being printed for distribution throughout Belfast and farther afield in a bid to bring as many people into the Lower Ormeau as possible to prevent the loyalist parade passing though the nationalist enclave in South Belfast.

A protest will take place Easter Sunday at 8 p.m. In previous protests, a majority of protesters have stayed nearby through the night and staged a second protest the following morning.

The Easter Monday march is generally regarded as the first loyalist parade of the marching season.

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Among those expected to speak at Sunday night’s rally is Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition spokesman Breandan Mac Cionnaith.

It’s feared the Parades Commission ruled in favor of the Apprentice Boys to send a message to Orangemen in Portadown that any compromise toward dialogue, however meaningless, will guarantee them a march down the Garvaghy Road this July.

In the past, attempts to hold a rally just before a loyalist parade in the Lower Ormeau area have resulted in multiple injuries to both protesters and the RUC. An intense security operation is likely to be mounted this weekend involving hundreds of RUC officers and armored vehicles.

People in the Lower Ormeau were "absolutely shocked and disbelieving" at the Parade Commission’s ruling not to re-route the loyalist parade on Easter Monday, according to spokesman Gerard Rice.

"It must be emphasized that this march has nothing to do with Protestant rights or culture. The main Apprentice Boys parade this Easter will take place at Limavady, Co. Derry, where they can express their identity all they like.

"The sole purpose of marching through the Lower Ormeau is to humiliate this community in a sectarian and triumphalist way as they have done so many times in the past."

The Lower Ormeau Concerned Community legal team is reviewing this and previous Parades Commission rulings with a view to taking an emergency judicial review in Belfast High Court this week.

On Friday, the Parades Commission stressed it did not accept any right of unlawful or violent protest. It pointed out it had imposed timing conditions on the LOCC protest parade, notified for the same day.

The Commission said it "looked for the group to conduct their protest with the same law-abiding dignity which the Apprentice Boys have shown on every occasion on which their parades have been rerouted."

Meanwhile, a United Nations report has called for a full judicial inquiry into the loyalist murder of human rights lawyer Rosemary Nelson, who was killed in a car bombing outside her home two years ago.

The UN "special rapporteur" on the independence of judges and courts, Malaysian lawyer Param Cumaraswamy, has also called again for the same status of inquiry into the murder of another lawyer, Pat Finucane, in 1989.

Addressing the United Nations in Geneva, the UN rapporteur said the current British government’s investigation into collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries in the Nelson and Finucane deaths was inadequate to the task.

The British government is resisting calls for full inquiries. Instead, two police investigations are under way, one headed by the London Metropolitan Police Commissioner, John Stevens, and the Nelson inquiry by another senior British police officer.

"I am concerned that the British government’s investigation into the murder of Rosemary Nelson has not resulted in any arrests," Cumaraswamy said. "In order to avoid any allegations of impunity leveled at the [British] government, I believe that it is essential for an independent judicial inquiry to be set up."

Cumaraswamy said he was frustrated at not having received a response from British Prime Minister Tony Blair to a letter sent last September supporting the setting up of a public judicial inquiry.

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