Thousands of protesters successfully blocked Garvaghy Road in Portadown in the north of Ireland on Sunday, preventing an Orange Order parade from entering the predominantly nationalist area following an 11th-hour court ruling that it could proceed. Ireland’s Parades Commission determined on Friday that up to 35 members of the Portadown District Orange Order could march early Sunday for the first time in 28 years, provided they did so without music. The parade had been banned from the mainly Catholic route since 1998. Garvaghy Road residents said on Saturday they had collected more than 4,000 signatures on a petition to stop the march. “The fact that the Orange Order, who are an exclusively Protestant organization, have decided that they want to march down a mainly Catholic road after 30 years of being told they can’t do it,” one protester said. “It just harks back to the almost supremacy of that way of thinking.” Late Saturday night, the High Court injunction stopping the parade was overturned by the Court of Appeal, before a fresh High Court hearing dismissed the residents’ challenge at around 2:15am Sunday. The Portadown parade was banned in 1998 after the so-called Drumcree dispute over Orange parades in nationalist neighborhoods sparked loyalist violence and police repression of nationalist protesters across the north.

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