Direct dialogue is the only way to achieve an accommodation at Drumcree, Sinn Fein's chief negotiator, Mr Martin McGuinness, said yesterday. And accommodation was the "key objective."
He appeared to indicate that progress could be made to resolve the growing crisis. "When people talk, things can happen," the MidUlster MP said after a meeting with representatives of the Garvaghy Road residents' coalition in the community centre.
He added: "It's time for everybody to get real here. It's time for the Orange Order and for unionism to waken up. The reality is that the people we represent are no longer going to be second-class citizens in their own country."
He spoke as the clean-up continued after another night of violence. The RUC and British army reinforced defences on the hill at Drumcree after loyalists, including some Orangemen, breached a section of the barbed-wire security fence to get into the no-man's land.
During the 90-minute midnight confrontation loyalists fired ball bearings at the RUC, who fired about 12 rounds of plastic bullets to quell the disturbance.
Protests continued around the town yesterday. But they were smaller than in previous days and there was less disruption. On the Scarva Road a truck was hijacked to block the road and its tyres were slashed. But police soon moved it off the road.
Mr McGuinness told reporters that "the bottom line" is direct dialogue with senior members of the Orange Order in Portadown, including the county Grand Master, Mr Denis Watson. What resulted from those discussions would then be a matter for the residents.
He said that over the last three years attempts were made by British governments and Orange institutions "to humiliate the people who live in these areas and to effectively tell those people that they are second-class citizens."
He denied his presence in the area was provocative. "We have been a very steadying influence on the entire political situation. All of our contributions have been reasonable.
"We have taken a very sensible and a very steady approach to everything that has happened on this island over the last four or five days."
Unionist leaders had to recognise that they "must step out of the shadows of the past and agree to negotiate and talk."
Mr Breandan Mac Cionnaith, chairman of the residents' coalition and an independent councillor, was asked afterwards about the pressure on him to step aside, because of the Orange Order's refusal to talk to him.
He said that during talks earlier this week, Mr Seamus Mallon, the SDLP deputy leader, told him, "We respect your electoral mandate." He was "one of the very few people to do that," added Mr Mac Cionnaith.
Later the SDLP assembly member, Ms Brid Rodgers, said that her party respected the electoral mandate of everybody in the democratic process, and the rights of groups to negotiate through their own leaders and representatives.
