An editorial in the Church of Ireland Gazette states that it would not be feasible to refuse Orangemen admittance to the church service at Drumcree. "A church service is open to all who feel called to come; and it will be appreciated that, if there were exclusions, the resulting fall-out would threaten to become even more serious and damaging than it already is," the editorial states. "It is the Church of Ireland at large which pays the price for its reluctant association with this annual catastrophe . . . Because it has not devised the means necessary to dissociate itself from the affair and its consequences, the ecclesiastical dilemma is very real."
While there might be a case for extending episcopal powers (to allow a bishop to intervene to postpone/cancel a service), the issue was "bound still to hinge on the question of enforcement and the popular will".
In a world in which, for many, authority was an "alien word", clergy would be unlikely to be able to persuade the Orangemen to desist any more than could "battalions of troops and police, ministers and political party leaders".
The paper suggests that the Orange Order itself shares some of the Church of Ireland's difficulties. "It is also a locally-based loose federation. It is not possible for the central administration to issue an order to the Portadown lodge at the centre of the dispute. But this does not exonerate the movement from the responsibility of deciding where it is heading and of taking account of the consequences in the wider community flowing therefrom."
The order's leadership no doubt "found it sobering, if not humiliating, that it was left to the young Presbyterian minister of a village church in Tyrone to display the moral courage demanded in the crisis". But the order still had to come to terms with its fundamental dilemma. "Deadlock preventing dialogue on Garvaghy Road must be broken. The order must look again at the options."
While the order was not a political party, it had been "dabbling in politics" at Drumcree to an extent which might give pause to many of its rank and file who, rightly or wrongly, regarded it as primarily a religious brotherhood.
"Its leadership needs to take a fresh compass reading and set a course which takes more account of the enlightened future the people voted for in the [Belfast] Agreement and which so many Orangemen claim to support."
