People Before Profit MLA Gerry Carroll said: "The prospect of mediation appears dead in the water - because the Orange Order was never serious about it. Its District Master said on Monday that the Order would consider mediation only once the parade had been completed. It demanded written guarantees that its determination wouldn't expire before it would even sit down. Now, the Order emerges from Hillsborough saying it looks forward to the law being applied. That is a party waiting for enforcement.”
"This is also a damning verdict on the way this place is governed. Power sharing was sold as the mechanism that would resolve exactly these kinds of disputes. But instead, a single Orange lodge with a grievance has brought the institutions to the brink in a week. This is the inevitable result of a system built on sectarian designation. It sorts people into orange and green before it counts them as tenants, patients or workers, and then it is astonished when every crisis comes back as a sectarian one.”
"The people of the Garvaghy Road were not protected by the Commission, the courts or the British or Irish governments. They were protected by each other. A united movement of working class people - of all religious denominations and none - over housing, health and wages is the only thing that has ever overcome sectarian mobilisation.”