Will N. Ireland parade bring violence?

Police and soldiers threw an armored cordon around Portadown on Saturday while government officials sought to thwart a clash over an annual march, which last year triggered Northern Ireland's most widespread rioting in a generation.

The Orange Order, Northern Ireland's main pro-British Protestant fraternal group, planned to march Sunday through the town, including a Catholic neighborhood where locals have vowed to block Garvaghy Road.Mo Mowlam, the British minister responsible for governing Northern Ireland, and Chief Constable Ronnie Flanagan, commander of the 12,000-strong police force, tried to persuade Orange leaders to back away from a confrontation.

Expecting trouble, British troops and police were deployed in a ring of armored cars at every road into this predominantly Protestant town southwest of Belfast.

Two Royal Air Force helicopters kept watch from above. Armored cars monitored traffic at the main entrance of Garvaghy Road. And Grenadier Guardsmen patrolled on foot near the Anglican church at Drumcree, north of Portadown, which is the focal point of the annual Orange march.

Last year, as Catholic residents mounted a protest on the pavement, police blocked the Orangemen outside the Anglican church a half-mile before they reached Garvaghy Road. For four nights, the Protestant mob there swelled behind lines of barbed wire, and Protestants elsewhere rioted and blocked roads, the main airport and port.

Judging that the situation was going out of control, the police reversed their decision and dragged protesters from Garvaghy Road to force the Orange march through. Catholic areas then erupted into three nights of fiercer rioting.

The weeklong carnage left two dead, hundreds wounded and more than $30 million in property wrecked.

Since then, the Orange Order - which has 80,000 members and played a key role in founding Northern Ireland as a Protestant-majority state in 1920 - has come under mounting pressure from Protestant church and business leaders to avoid a repeat.

The County Armagh branch of the order on Friday offered a scaled-back version of their intended parade: Only one British flag and no Protestant politicians would lead the march along Garvaghy Road, and two bands would play no music as they passed through the Catholic neighborhood.

But the protest leader, former Irish Republican Army prisoner Breandan MacCionnaith, emphasized that "no Orange feet" would be permitted on the road unless Orange leaders agreed to meet him for direct talks.