After the drama of Sunday's Orange march, or the part of it they could see, Garvaghy Road residents were yesterday resigned to the tedium of waiting - waiting for some solution to the Drumcree standoff.
They tuned in to radio and television for news of the rest of the North and reports of sporadic violence. A few miles away in Craigavon the RUC had cordoned off roads after buses were reported hijacked and set alight. Further afield the political and media focus had moved to Belfast for the Parade Commission's decision on the Lower Ormeau Road and other contentious parades. Lower Ormeau was a "trade-off" that the Garvaghy Road Residents' Coalition did not welcome. Its chairman, Mr Breandan Mac Cionnaith, said there was a clear link between the Drumcree and Ormeau decisions. The Ormeau Road residents were being "victimised and penalised" because of the decision to reroute the Drumcree parade.
He was "fearful of the consequences this decision will have for our community in Portadown. It will encourage the Orange Order to mass very large numbers of people rather than to send them home." Ms Bairbre de Brun, a Sinn Fein Assembly member for West Belfast, said: "It smacks of a political trade-off." Visiting the residents on Garvaghy Road, she said the Ormeau Road residents were "going to be humiliated in the way the Garvaghy Road residents were in the past, by having an Orange parade down their road, officially sanctioned". "There should be no trying to trade off. They should actually try and understand what they are doing to the communities." She was asked if she agreed that the Ormeau residents should accept the commission's decision in the same way that nationalists wanted the Orange Order to accept it in Drumcree. Ms de Brun said: "Our feeling is that the Orangemen should decide not to go into areas where they are causing difficulties. The Ormeau Road and the Garvaghy Road are two areas where they know the hurt that it causes."
The sound of the Lambeg drum certainly caused some hurt. Its penetrating and unique beat could be heard for over a mile from the field where the Orangemen and others remained in their hundreds. The drums sounded all afternoon as the security forces watched from the other side of the massive security barrier which some cynics dubbed "the peace line".
