Ciara

[Ciara @CeeeJ81]

@irish_news Let’s be honest Portadown town centre never has and never will be a shared space so the parade isn’t contentious; these marches happen all year round, supporters will line the streets in town as usual and nobody else cares 🤷‍♂️

[Amanda Ferguson @AmandaFBelfast]

Court hears the presence of persons with potential violent intent doesn’t extinguish the rights of people peacefully protesting.

[Brendan McNally @BrendanArmagh]

No home should ever be a prison of fear, anxiety, domination and hurt.

At Belfast City Hall for the launch of the Housing Executive’s domestic abuse awareness week. The building was lit up in purple to show victims that they aren’t forgotten and without help.

[Ciara @CeeeJ81]

@StanCollymore Gangs of London

[Ciara @CeeeJ81]

@DavidVance Have you parents permission to share images of their kids online.

[Ciara @CeeeJ81]

@Armagh_GAA desperate service for todays final.. several cut outs during match and then down for over a minute saying game over.
Back on now but picture dreadful

[Ciara @CeeeJ81]

@DarranMarshall GRMA @GerryCarrollPBP For your support!

[Carl Whyte @CarlJWhyte]

Courts don't decide determinations, only the legality of the process in which a determination is reached. They cannot account for the worst ever Commission making the worst ever Parades Commission determination.

Thankfully the Secretary of State finally saw sense and dealt with a situation he could have avoided himself if he'd sacked the Commission when their initial failings became clear

[Catherine Nelson @CatSeeley]

The people who sprayed this at Pauls workplace - could not lace his boots.

A man of community - selfless, dedicated and courageously taking a stand against sectarianism and intimidation.

Those using the language of mob, rabble, sanitise and sterilise in relation to the Garvaghy Road and its people need to urgently stand down and reflect on their language.

In the 1990s - 21 people lost their lives as a result of the Drumcree dispute. Threats like this to Paul are precisely the reason we took such a strong stand against those eager to drag us back.

Solidarity to Paul. There can be no going back.

[Maceroni @Maceroni2000]

Many PUL opposed the march, and let's not kid ourselves, the CNR community also have those same marching rights, but they choose not to impose them on their neighbours out of respect.

[Jim @devlinjim]

The Orange Order will not be walking down the Garvaghy Road. Well done to every single person who stood in solidarity with the residents and said “Never Again”. The hurt inflicted on that community in the past was shamefully belittled. But this time the knee was not for bending.

[Amanda Ferguson @AmandaFBelfast]

NEW from PBP: People power forced Drumcree u-turn
Tonight, the Secretary of State made the right call to stop this unwanted march from going ahead. But nobody should be in any doubt about what produced it.
This didn’t come from the Parades Commission, which folded the moment the DUP and the TUV turned up the pressure. It didn’t come from the courts, which made a series of harried decisions through the night. Nor did it come from a Secretary of State who spent nearly a fortnight disingenuously insisting his hands were tied.
It came from the community of the Garvaghy Road, as well as thousands of ordinary people standing with them over the past two weeks. Working class communities organised from below forced every institution in this place to move. That is a lesson that should never be forgotten.
This crisis has also exposed the utter failure of ruling class unionism to deliver. The DUP can’t build houses. It can’t get people a hospital appointment. It can’t deliver a single thing for the communities it claims to speak for. It reaches for sectarian division instead, because division is the only thing it has ever reliably produced. Working class Protestants are on the same housing lists and in the same hospital queues as their Catholic neighbours, and no march down anybody’s road has ever changed that.
The Orange Order was built for exactly this job. Orangeism is not a culture, but an instrument for keeping working people apart while those at the top hold on to what they have. We should expect unionist elites to fight this all the way. More court action, more talk of surrender to the mob, possibly even collapsing the institutions in protest. Let them try.
The political leaders of unionism - elected and unelected - spent two weeks trying to mobilise a base that did not turn out, because most Protestants and unionists in this country have no appetite whatsoever for a return to the bigotry of the past. The days when unionist supremacy could simply be imposed on people are gone and they are not coming back.
What replaces it is up to us. Not a united Ireland run by the same landlords and developers who run things now, but a socialist Ireland built by working class people - of all backgrounds and from all communities - organised together. We’ve seen a glimpse of what that looks like on the Garvaghy Road. Our job now is to build it across Ireland.

[ruth allum @mgtruth]

@cellah26bsky Had this conversation yesterday. There are hundreds of breaches of parades annually but largely a caution at most apparently?
They’ve created some rod for their own backs.

[Marcella @cellah26bsky]

@mgtruth I'll tell you the PSNI are going to be extremely busy in the next year when "nobody is above the law" come flags, illegal bonfires etc etc 🤷‍♀️
Good to see they have the manpower & finances for this.

[Petronilla de Midia @MidiaPetronilla]

From Deputy Leader Diana Armstrong @uuponline
"...a farmer compensated at 2024 values cannot buy equivalent replacement land in to-day's market...."

[Richard Grant @RichardJGrant]

The three unionist party leaders at Stormont haven't a single vote between them, Pengelly twice rejected and co-opted, Burrows co-opted and unapposed as leader, Gaston co-opted and a one man band. Democracy, unionist style

[Oswald Baggins @OswaldBaggins11]

@brendanhughes64 @BBCNewsNI First Minister - 10,845 votes

Deputy first minister - 0 votes

UUP leader - 0 votes

TUV assembly leader - 0 votes

Unionists really do still think it's 1970 up in that place lol.

Not a single vote between the 3 Unionist party Stormont Leads 😂😂😂😂

[John McKeown @irelandresource]

Apparently unionism and loyalism have suddenly become the eternal guardians of peaceful protest, restraint and the rule of law. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of NI knows how selective that version of history is.

And this newfound horror at “mobs” gathering on streets is particularly difficult to take seriously from you.

You were one of the prominent voices of the loyalist flag-protest FFS , a campaign built around people taking to the streets, demonstrations and road disruption. Some of those protests descended into serious disorder.

And let’s talk about Drumcree.

When loyalism didn’t get the outcome it wanted, NI didn’t simply witness dignified disagreement. We saw roadblocks, hijacked and burning vehicles, petrol bombs, attacks on police, widespread destruction and even gunfire.

In 2000 alone, during protests surrounding Drumcree, RUC figures recorded 288 petrol-bomb incidents, 280 attacks on the security forces, 13 shooting incidents and 88 hijacked vehicles. Fifty-seven RUC officers and five soldiers were injured, while hundreds of vehicles and properties were damaged.

People remember roads being brought to a standstill. They remember burning vehicles and barricades. They remember police coming under sustained attack.

So spare everyone the fairy tale that loyalism has historically responded to decisions it dislikes with nothing but “great restraint and discipline.”

There were occasions when loyalists didn’t merely stand on a road, they helped wreck the place when they didn’t get their way.

And here’s the hypocrisy, that history does not make every unionist or loyalist responsible for those actions.

You understood perfectly well that individuals were responsible for their own behaviour when protests involved your community.

Yet today you take alleged offences by individuals and repeatedly smear an entire nationalist crowd as a “lawbreaking mob”.

And now comes the remarkable transformation.

After weeks of rhetoric about “Nazi-style” politics, “republican mobs”, “supremacists” and nationalist “hatred”, suddenly everything is about law, dignity, restraint and peaceful protest.

It looks remarkably like an attempt to walk back the rhetoric now that the temperature has risen.

The internet has receipts. The rhetoric didn’t disappear just because the strategy changed.

If somebody commits an offence, investigate them and prosecute them on the evidence. Nobody gets a free pass.

But collective guilt cannot suddenly become acceptable because the crowd is nationalist.

And perhaps you might consider your own contribution to creating this atmosphere. From the outside, this increasingly looks less like leadership and more like someone who has spent weeks placing himself at the centre of a deeply sensitive dispute, escalating the language and enhancing his own profile in the process.

You cannot spend weeks pouring rhetorical petrol on a fire and then arrive dressed as the fire marshal demanding everyone else explain the flames.

And perhaps the most revealing words in the entire post are, “It’s time the State…faced them down.”

There it is, old mentality that when one community refuses to yield, the State should simply “face them down.”

History may be rather less flattering than the heroic role you have written for yourself

You may imagine these weeks will record you as some fearless defender of loyalism who stood firm while everyone else surrendered.

Others will remember something very different, armchair blogger who inserted himself into a decades-old dispute, relentlessly amplified the most inflammatory rhetoric, turned the temperature up, and then tried to distance himself from the resulting mess by suddenly discovering the language of restraint and the rule of law.

That’s not fearless leadership, That’s a cautionary tale about what happens when you get in way over your head

The rule of law didn’t suddenly become sacred when the people standing in the road stopped being loyalists.

[Michelle O’Neill @moneillsf]

WOW! 👏🏼

Oasis’s Noel Gallagher

Oscar-winning actor Susan Sarandon

The Smiths founder Johnny Marr

Legend of music Paul Weller

Actors Siobhán McSweeney and Adrian Dunbar

And dozens of other big names in music, film and the arts have just put their names to a letter supporting the right of Garvaghy Road residents to live in peace, free from intimidation.