‘Trauma still there’: A decades-old standoff returns to Northern Ireland

Families who lived through one of the Troubles’ worst flashpoints fear its legacy is reaching another generation.

Portadown, Northern Ireland – When the summer holidays arrived, Chris Nelson worried about his mother.

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Rosemary would spend summer evenings alongside the residents on Garvaghy Road. Before leaving home each evening, she told her son that she was going to look after families and make sure their children were okay. She compared them to his friends at primary school.

His mother helped people from both sides of the community. When work allowed, the family went to Bundoran, across the border, and for a day the fear would pass.

“That was very traumatic. I was always thinking something was going to happen to my mum.”

As she braked at a nearby junction, a bomb beneath her car exploded. Her eight-year-old daughter, Sarah, was at primary school nearby and heard the blast. The family had spent the previous weekend in Bundoran together.

Nearly three decades later, another standoff has recast these childhood memories into fears for the next generation, with a renewed attempt by the Protestant Orange Order to march through the Catholic neighbourhood, threatening to unravel a fragile peace.

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement established a framework for peace and power-sharing.

But this was suddenly unsettled by a last-minute decision by the High Court to allow the march. In response, Catholic residents blocked the road. Many camped out as Orange men gathered at the top of the road, awaiting police permission to pass – an image of division that never truly left.

Many of the Garvaghy Road residents are now parents, and fear what their children might inherit from a dispute they hoped had been left behind.