Talks between elected representatives in the Craigavon area, including First Minister David Trimble and Garvaghy Road Residents' spokesperson Breandán MacCionnaith, aimed at solving the siege of nationalists on the Garvaghy Road, broke up on Monday 10 May without any major breakthrough.

After this, the second such meeting, Breandán MacCionnaith said: ``We have taken two small steps over two weeks but there is a long arduous journey ahead. There is no quick fix to Portadown.'' He explained that during the two-and-a-half-hour meeting, both himself and David Trimble discussed the whole equality issue in Portadown. It is believed that more talks are planned for next week.

Meanwhile, MacCionnaith attended a Friends of the Garvaghy Road meeting in Dundalk on Monday, 10 May. He said: ``Our community has suffered continual discrimination, harassment and sectarian attacks. We are calling on the Irish and British governments and all political parties to support the rights of Garvaghy Road residents who are under siege.''

London Garvaghy support group launched

    
  The loyalists are hired guns for respectable, church-going people. People will draw similarities with the deep south of the United States; you have the LVF who are racist, crazed KKK-type figures, and then you've got respectable people, Rotarians, business folk who don't get their hands dirty. 
- Jeremy Hardy

A new support group for the Garvaghy Road Residents' Coalition was formally launched on Friday 7 May in London. The group, The Friends of Garvaghy Road, will work to raise awareness in England of the ongoing situation in Portadown by lobbying parliament, holding pickets and adding to the pressure on the British government to hold proper, independent inquiries into the police handling of Robert Hamill's murder and into the circumstances surrounding the killing of Rosemary Nelson.

The launch was addressed by residents' leader Breandán Mac Cionnaith and the comedian Jeremy Hardy, who had been working with Rosemary Nelson before her death on the campaign to obtain justice for Robert Hamill's family.

``One of last things Rosemary did was to talk to some of us in London about launching a London committee for the Robert Hamill campaign and I went over for a fund-raising event on the Garvaghy Road,'' he said. ``Rosemary was all set to come over and two weeks later she was dead. She was a campaigning solicitor, somebody who put herself on the line. Not many solicitors would

do this - get beaten up and abused and called a Fenian slut and a whore by the RUC.''

    
 
There's a joke in Portadown, `where's Robbie now?' where they do a little kicking dance demonstrating kicking somebody in the head. Now they also say, `where's Rosie now?'. That's the loyalist sense of humour. This is what we're dealing with in Portadown. And big people like Trimble sit back and say it's terrible, but they don't do anything about it. 

- Jeremy Hardy

He also spoke about the nature of collusion and the role it is likely to have played in Rosemary's death. ``People misunderstand collusion; they think that what happens is that loyalists go to their friends and say `we'd like to kill somebody - can you help us?'. What actually happens is that loyalists are commissioned. They are asked by the RIR, by the RUC, by MI5, by Special Branch. The loyalists are hired guns for respectable, church-going people. People will draw similarities with the deep south of the United States; you have the LVF who are racist, crazed KKK-type figures, and then you've got respectable people, Rotarians, business folk who don't get their hands dirty.''

On the killing of Robert Hamill, he said;

``We thought that the Stephen Lawrence case was bad. The RUC were actually there; they witnessed it, the suspects were standing in front of them. They actually picked one up and then let him go.''

He also spoke of how loyalist mobs in Portadown had prevented Robert Hamill's father going to mass: ``He had to face the people who killed his son. There's a joke in Portadown, `where's Robbie now?' where they do a little kicking dance demonstrating kicking somebody in the head. Now they also say, `where's Rosie now?'. That's the loyalist sense of humour. This is what we're dealing with in Portadown. And big people like Trimble sit back and say it's terrible, but they don't do anything about it. They don't contact the Hamill family to express their condolences, they don't ask for

an independent inquiry into Robert's or Rosemary's case. These are respectable people. David Trimble is a respectable man, he's a businessman, he's an Orangeman. He is the First Minister of Northern Ireland and this is what the peace process has given us.''

Breandán Mac Cionnaith gave the audience a graphic account of the ongoing violence in Portadown, with families intimidated out of their homes and Catholic business attacked and burned.

``All the nationalist community in Portadown wants is the right to be treated equally in their own town and their own country. Portadown in many ways is a microcosm of the Six Counties, 30 years ago. It is a unionist-controlled area which has a very substantial nationalist minority which is discriminated against, which is not treated equally under the law, which is continually harassed, which is constantly suppressed by the supremacism of the Orange Order.

``Many people say that the whole issue of marching in Portadown is merely an issue of competing rights. I have challenged them and said; how do you make it to be an issue of competing rights on these marches, because if we were talking about a fascist march through a Jewish or Muslim community, then we wouldn't be discussing competing rights. If we were in Alabama or Mississippi in the 1960s, nobody would be talking competing rights. They would be talking about the denial of rights.

``That is the crux of the matter in Portadown, not just at the present time, but over the last number of years when the Orange Order had tried time and time again to exercise its supremacy over my community. Those people at Drumcree and their supporters have exactly the same mindset as those people who opposed the civil rights reforms 30 years ago.''