UK: DRUMCREE: ORANGE ORDER PARADE: LATEST SITUATION

(3 Jul 1999) English/Nat
Northern Ireland is facing a day of rising tension as hundreds of Protestant Orange Order members prepare to descend on Portadown to protest over the banning of the Drumcree parade on Sunday.
The Orange Order has traditionally held marches across the country during the summer months, many of which have created tension where they pass through Catholic areas because they are seen as a show of force.
A massive security operation has swung into action around Drumcree parish church, where the Army and security services are standing guard around concrete barricades, and barbed-wire fences.
A violent weekend in Portadown would make it even more difficult for the main parties in Northern Ireland to break the impasse over paramilitary weapons.
Orange Order leaders appealed for calm on Saturday after British Prime Minister Tony Blair failed to broker a compromise over Sunday's parade.
A huge range of security measures have been put in place to prevent trouble, while the Orange Order Grand Master Robert Saulters wrote to all Orange lodges across Northern Ireland calling for calm.
He said they should put "country before self interest", and there should be no roadblocks, and no sustained
protests.
Hundreds of troops and police have been drafted in and dozens of road blocks erected in the vicinity.
The police and army have thrown heavy fortifications around the Drumcree parish church to prevent the Orangemen parading from there down the nationalist Garvaghy Road.
A six-metre high steel and corrugated iron barricade has been welded into place to block off the route to the nationalist area, topped off with thick coils of razor wire.
Near the army barricades a Christian group has set up a tent where it hopes believers from both sides of the sectarian divide will join it to pray for peace.
SOUNDBITE: (English)
"We have found the Catholic people to be very open hearted towards us. but then we find members of the Protestant community to be like that as well. And obviously I think that some of the Protestant people think that because we talk with Catholics and because we would pray with Catholics we've sold the Gospel short but you know, that's not our view."
SUPER CAPTION: Paul White, Christian praying for peace
Troops have dug a series of ditches in the surrounding fields which give the area something of the feel of a medieval battle field.
The authorities hope such measures will make it impossible for large numbers of Orangemen to congregate here as they did last year.
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