Police Brace for Test of N. Ireland Peace Deal

With barbed wire and a 3-mile trench as deep as a grave, police and soldiers walled in the Catholic enclave of this Northern Irish town Saturday to protect it from its Protestant neighbors as the biggest test yet of a fragile peace deal here looms today.

Protestant members of the Orange Order brotherhood have traditionally donned dark suits, bowler hats and orange sashes to march through town--and through the Catholic Garvaghy Road area--on July 5. Even though marches in the last three years have provoked sectarian violence, the Orangemen do not plan to let this spring’s Northern Ireland peace agreement get in their way today.

They have said they will defy a ban on marching down Garvaghy Road, a long cluster of modern bungalows where all 8,000 Catholics in this town of 30,000 people live. The province’s independent Parades Commission ruled Monday that the Orangemen should end their march at the Protestant Drumcree Church, set in rolling green fields at the approach to the Catholic area, and return home by a less provocative route.

But the pro-British Orangemen, who suspect that the peace agreement spells the end of their centuries of dominance over Northern Ireland’s pro-Irish Catholic minority--and are determined to survive at all costs--are on a collision course with the British army and Northern Ireland’s police.

If they are prevented from marching down the Garvaghy road, they say, they will stay at Drumcree Church until they are allowed through--however long that takes.

Appeals for compromise by British and Irish politicians, Northern Irish church leaders and newspapers--all of whom fear that any violence breaking out now might escalate and threaten the future of peace--have had no effect. Stubborn and defiant, the two rival communities of Portadown are waiting for trouble.

Inside the barricades on Garvaghy Road, Catholic families from houses hung with the Irish tricolor flag of green, white and orange sunned themselves and their children, restless ahead of what may become a Protestant invasion of pro-British loyalists if the barbed-wire fences do not work.

Unemployed, unmarried Lisa, who at 18 lives with her jobless parents and two children in one of half a dozen housing estates along the road, said she has never experienced the annual parades personally. Until this year, her family slipped away to England every July to avoid the clashes.

This year, for the first time, the family did not have enough money to join the flood of “Drumcree tourists.”

“This is my first year of seeing anything, but I don’t think it’s hit me yet,” she said, giggling nervously while rocking her 4-month-old baby. “It’s not for giving moral support so much that I’m here. It’s the money. What I worry about, though, is the kids. If anything happens on the road, we can run, but the children can’t.”

She and her friends had voted against the peace agreement in a May referendum, suspicious that leading Protestant politicians as well as Catholic leaders were supporting it.

Their skepticism was focused on David Trimble, the moderate Protestant politician who last week became first minister of a new Protestant and Catholic Assembly.

“I voted ‘no’ because I thought anything David Trimble was in favor of must be wrong,” said Lisa’s cousin, Caroline Reynolds. The other three women rocking babies on a municipal park bench laughed sympathetically.

The surprise defenses thrown up before dawn Saturday by police and British troops--three barbed-wire fences circling the Garvaghy area, the trench and huge containers filled with concrete sealing off both ends of the road--are supposed to stop Orangemen breaking into the little Catholic enclave across the fields after they leave Drumcree Church.

The lines are patrolled by dozens of armored personnel carriers and hundreds of armed young men in uniform checking documents at roadblocks around town.

Sullen Protestants from across Portadown drove up to the Drumcree Church on Saturday afternoon to inspect the fortifications. Cars filled the road as young men with shaved heads watched the troops unroll fresh rolls of wire.

“I think it’s a disgrace,” one elderly man in tweeds said.

“They [the Catholics] say they feel hemmed in, but now they’re happy enough to be hemmed in, aren’t they?” asked a gaudily made-up woman in her 50s.

Reflecting the anger of the Protestant loyalist community that the police, mainly Protestant and pro-British themselves, are protecting the Catholics, she added: “They’ve changed sides. They’ve taken sides. They’ve abandoned us.

“I’ll be with the Orange march tomorrow,” she said. “Giving them moral support.”

Most people in this bastion of sectarian passions, whether Catholic or Protestant, were hostile to a May referendum on the peace agreement.

“This is a total, last-ditch effort to break down the Orange Order,” complained a staunch Protestant angered at the sight of British security forces enforcing a barbed-wire “sterile zone” around the hilltop church.

The Protestant farmer said a ban that has been imposed on part of today’s parade was an example of the “dictatorship that is run by [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair . . . and the Church of Rome to accommodate Romanism.”

Protestant politician Ian Paisley, leader of the Democrat Unionist Party who regards the peace deal as a sellout of Protestant influence, visited Portadown on Saturday to stiffen the loyalists’ resolve.

But Trimble said: “We do not want to see the two sides in our community embark on a collision course where there will only be losers.”

“The impasse over Drumcree must not be allowed to cast a shadow over the optimism of the vast majority of our people and their will to create peace and stability,” Seamus Mallon, his moderate nationalist deputy, said.