Who is Breandán Mac Cionnaith, the Garvaghy Road protest leader for decades?

To have been a fly on the wall when Breandán Mac Cionnaith met Britain’s Northern Secretary Chris Bryant on Monday afternoon would have been interesting. Former Labour prime minister Tony Blair could have briefed Bryant on what to expect.In his memoir, Blair remembered the Drumcree “nightmare” that began in the mid-1990s. He didn’t specify whether he was referring to the Orange Order or the Garvaghy residents, or both,, but his view was that “the Drumcree people were the unreasonable of the unreasonable of the unreasonable”. “In the Premier League of unreasonableness, they left every other faction and every other dispute gasping in their wake,” he wrote. And then he lighted on “this one guy, Breandán Mac Cionnaith”. He painted a picture: “He took unreasonableness to an art form. He conceded nothing, and I mean nothing. I’m not just talking about the substance of meetings, I mean where a meeting should be held. Who should be there. Who shouldn’t be there. When it began. When it ended. What its purpose was. Who spoke first. Who spoke last. Who spoke in between first and last.” READ MOREMac Cionnaith, as head of the Garvaghy Road Residents’ Coalition, might take pride in that description. He is a true not-an-inch republican, as in not an inch of the Garvaghy Road shall the Orange Order parade upon. It’s been a generation and a little bit more since he dominated the headlines and the news bulletins during the worst of the Drumcree disputes that ran from 1995 to the early 2000s. Here he is once again in the front line after that curious decision by the Parades Commission generated such community and political turmoil that it could bring down Stormont.Not that the Northern Ireland Executive and/or Assembly crashing would be likely to bother him. A former IRA prisoner, he split from Sinn Féin principally over policing in 2007 and is now a senior activist with the republican socialist group Éirígí, viewed as dissident in its politics.Mac Cionnaith obviously looks a bit older than he did during the heady days of the mid-1990s, but he still boils with the same energy and quiet fury and vituperation that made him such a hate figure for many unionists and Orangemen. And neither has he any time for the PSNI. He told one officer on Sunday that he would not negotiate with him because he did not trust the police.[ Drumcree, 2026: ‘It’s mad they want to go down the road and start all this again’Opens in new window ]He reiterated this point to the nationalist protesters who blocked Garvaghy Road. “There is a chance that the cops might be moving in,” warned Mac Cionnaith. “They are not going to clear this road and let them f**kers down.”Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill were on hand in the rain to support the Garvaghy residents but on the road this was Mac Cionnaith’s show, which must have galled the Sinn Féin leaders. For a period Mac Cionnaith and the leadership of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were fairly tight. He was a councillor on Craigavon Borough Council from 1997 to 2001 and in the 2000s he had a job as adviser to Upper Bann Assembly member John O’Dowd. But he quit that post and Sinn Féin in 2007 primarily, it is believed, over Sinn Féin finally signing up to support the PSNI.Breandán Mac Cionnaith outside Belfast High Court on Saturday after judge Patricia Smyth issued a temporary injunction banning members of the Orange Order from marching at Garvaghy Road in Portadown. Photograph: Mark Marlow/PA Wire If he despises the Orange Order, comparing it to the Ku Klux Klan and the British National Front, the feeling decidedly is mutual. Orange leaders, making a point, tend not to use his Irish surname. The then Orange Order chaplain, Rev William Bingham, told journalist Susan McKay that during the tumult of the 1990s the dispute could not be resolved because “every year we hit a brick wall, every year we hit Brendan McKenna”.They also dislike Mac Cionnaith for his part as an IRA member in blowing up the Royal British Legion hall in Portadown. He served four years in prison from 1981 to the end of 1984 for the attack. Now in his late 60s, he was involved in the republican movement from his teens. He was raised in Lurgan, Co Armagh, his family moving from Aghagallon in Co Antrim when he was very young. After marriage in the late 1970s he moved to Portadown, where he has lived ever since. He was influenced by a grandfather who fought in the War of Independence and took the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War. He was taken with the 19th-century Fenian movement and the 1798 United Irishmen and Wolfe Tone’s idea of uniting Catholic, Protestant and dissenter which, he said, was the polar opposite of the “sectarianism of the Orange Order”.However this resurrected dispute unfolds, Mac Cionnaith doesn’t seem to have lost any of the inflexible attitude that fascinated and frustrated Tony Blair. After meeting Northern Secretary Chris Bryant he said he was open to an “international mediator” being appointed but didn’t offer any suggestion that such intercession might lead to Orange feet on the Garvaghy Road. “Our community has no confidence in the Orange Order. They have no faith in the Orange Order, so no matter what the Orange Order says or does at the present time it is doubtful if anybody in our community would actually believe them.”