Debate contribution: Parades Commission: Drumcree Determination
Debate contribution by Ms Emma Sheerin on .
- MLA
- Ms Emma Sheerin
- Party at the time
- Sinn Féin
- Date
- 28 September 2026
- Type
- Debate contribution
- Business
- Matter of the Day
- Heading
- Parades Commission: Drumcree Determination
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 5761734
Read the official Assembly record
Text
What we saw in recent days goes beyond my comprehension, but what I understand very clearly, and what the nationalist people of the North understand very clearly, is that the Orange Order thinks that nothing has changed in the past 30 years. That is where it is wrong. It thinks that it can still do whatever it wants. It thinks that its want to walk down a road where it is not welcome is more important than the rights of the residents of that road to live free from sectarian intimidation. It is wrong in thinking that. If the Orange Order were to walk down the Garvaghy Road, it would be to trample over the graves of the 21 people who lost their life as a result of the Drumcree dispute. The nationalist people of the North got off their knees in the nineties, and we are not getting back down on them. They solved the Drumcree dispute. They won a peace for us all that we must now protect. What I say to the person who tabled the Matter of the Day — to you, and to you, to you and to each and every single one of you — is this: you are an absolute disgrace. You are an embarrassment.
You have spent the past few weeks working away behind the scenes to try to drag us back to the past by trying to impose on us what is nothing more and nothing less than a supremacist, bigoted, sectarian hate-fest. I can tell you very clearly —.
I say it very clearly —
— that you will not —
— impose —.
I will direct my remarks through the Chair. Nobody in the Chamber, or outside of it, will impose that parade on the residents of the Garvaghy Road. We are not going back. Sin é.
308 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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