Ulster Covenant march could stoke violence in Belfast, locals fear A loyalist marching band parades through a Republican area. The parades are an annual sectarian flashpoint. Photograph: Peter Morrison/AP In 1912, the legend goes, some Ulster loyalists signed the covenant opposing Home Rule in their own blood. Almost exactly 100 years later there are fears that blood may spilled today as up to 30,000 loyalists pour into central Belfast to commemorate the mass rally at City Hall where the loyalist leader Sir Edward Carson threatened to plunge Ireland into civil war. The potential sectarian flashpoint is a route past one of the city's oldest Catholic churches near the city centre, which thousands of loyalists are expected to pass later this morning. A last-minute legal bid to further tighten restrictions on the loyalist parade was rejected by the high court last night when a judge in Belfast refused leave for a judicial review of measures already imposed. The Parades Commission - the body that adjudicates on controversial marches - had banned loyalist bands playing sectarian tunes as they passed St Patrick's chapel on Donegall Street but some residents felt the measure did not go far enough and wanted a ban on any music near the church, with bands restricted to a single drum beat. The church was originally a symbol of close co-operation and mutual toleration between Belfast Catholics and Protestants in the late 18th century until the first decade of the 19th. The second Catholic church built in the city at the start of the 19th century was constructed thanks in part to the largesse of wealthy Protestants. Donegall Street - named after the Protestant landowner who leased the land to the Catholics for the church - is a north-south arterial route from the most divided sector of Belfast into the city centre, leading down into the post-ceasefire bohemian arts district known as the Cathedral Quarter. Now it has become the latest in a series of territorial battlegrounds, from Derry's ancient walls to the Presbyterian church at Drumcree in Portadown, connected with the seemingly never-ending parades disputes between loyalist marchers and nationalist residents across the north of Ireland. The spark that lit this recent conflagration was the behaviour of a Shankill Road loyalist marching band on 12 July - the most sacred day in the Ulster Protestant calendar. The Young Conway Volunteers were caught on video outside St Patrick's playing a sectarian tune mocking the Irish Famine. In response, the Parades Commission ruled that, in a subsequent loyalist parade in August, the band should not play music as they passed by the chapel. But the marching band ignored the ruling and continued playing outside the church doors, enraging local Catholics and sparking 72 hours of rioting, which left 67 police officers injured. With up to 30,000 loyalists expected to gather to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Ulster Covenant's signing, all the focus is on a feeder parade of Orangemen and their supporters marching past St Patrick's church this morning. There were several flickers of hope at the end of this week when it emerged that the Orange Order had, without much prior warning or fanfare, lifted its official ban on the institution holding talks with nationalist community groups. The Rev Mervyn Gibson, a Belfast Orangeman, confirmed that the loyal order had changed its policy. "We have no law in the institution that now prevents us from talking to residents groups with Sinn Féin [members] in them or anybody else in them," Gibson said. As late as Thursday afternoon, however, no direct talks had taken place between the Orange Order and the Catholic residents of Carrick Hill, the nationalist area to the right of St Patrick's, the latter complaining that up until now no dialogue had taken place between the two sides. Gerry Kelly, a Sinn Féin member of the Northern Ireland assembly for the area and a Stormont minister, repeated his call for the loyalist marching orders to start talking directly to the residents living around St Patrick's church. "The residents still want dialogue and that dialogue should happen now," Kelly said. Both Sinn Féin and the Carrick Hill Residents Association later issued appeals for peaceful and dignified protests. Mindful of the potential for violent disorder outside his church, the Very Rev Michael Sheehan, the administrator of St Patrick's, also called for a lowering of communal temperatures. In the absence of local agreement, the Parades Commission has now made their determination about this parade. It is incumbent on all law-abiding citizens to adhere to their determination. In advance of the parade I would appeal for calm and respect over the coming days," the priest said. That ruling includes only hymns being played by loyalist bands as they file past St Patrick's as well as restrictions on the number of nationalist counter-demonstrators to just 150. The Parades Commission also took most of Northern Ireland by surprise in their ruling this week that Orange and loyalist bands must also only play religious music while passing by St Matthews Catholic church, beside the nationalist enclave of Short Strand in east Belfast. The loyalist paramilitary groups, which are observing a ceasefire, have also signalled a desire for Ulster Covenant day not to descend into sectarian warfare, particularly in north Belfast where a quarter of all the deaths during the Troubles occurred between 1969 and 1997. A secret envoy who carried messages back and forth between the loyalist terror organisations and the Irish government in the run-up to the 1994 ceasefires has come out of retirement to help defuse tensions within loyalism. Chris Hudson, a Dublin-born trade unionist who has been holding talks with the loyalists over the last fortnight, told the Guardian last night that both the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) had assured him that they had no interest in allowing Ulster Covenant Day to degenerate into sectarian disorder, possibly triggering a fresh round of civil conflict. My view is it should be much calmer this weekend unless others [republican dissidents from elsewhere] get involved. They [the UDA and UVF] accept that Sinn Féin are not using this [to foment protest] and have no interest in raising the temperature. Hudson said: "They have assured me that they are not involved in any attempt to make the situation worse. That they have no interest in escalating matters, that they have nothing to gain. He said reports that the UVF had directed previous unrest in August from the balcony of a local Orange Hall a few hundred metres north of St Patrick's were "nonsense."