Michelle O’Neill has questioned the decision making of the Parades Commission and called on the Northern Ireland Secretary Sir Chris Bryant to intervene in the parade dispute.<\/p>\n
Asked if she thought Stormont could collapse over Drumcree, she said: “The progress of the last 28 years have been brought into question by the actions of the Orange Order and those within political unionism that want to drag us backwards.<\/p>\n
“What’s the point? What’s the point whenever people are going to railroad over their rights?”<\/p>\n
Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MP Carla Lockhart said the first minister was “whipping up hysteria” at an unlawful protest.<\/p>\n
She called O’Neill’s comments “outrageous” and the protesters a “rabble”.<\/p>\n
“The law is on our side,” she said.<\/p>\n
“They’re afraid of 35 men, walking down a road silently.”<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has appealed for “calm on all sides”, saying there have been “big gains made in Northern Ireland, and we don’t want to see things go backwards”.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the Irish government said: “Our primary concern remains to avoid a return to the divisions of the past, recalling the significant progress made over many years in furthering reconciliation under the Good Friday Agreement.”<\/p>\n
Officers are operating checkpoints on the main roads into Portadown, and they are reporting a steady stream of vehicles arriving into the County Armagh town. <\/p>\n
Drivers are being handed an information sheet, which says police will seek to facilitate peaceful protest where possible. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michelle O’Neill has questioned the decision making of the Parades Commission and called on the Northern Ireland Secretary…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":784113,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-784112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=784112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/784113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=784112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=784112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=784112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}