The Portadown Orangemen who marched down Garvaghy Road were given a heroes' welcome of cheers and applause on a scale more associated with an FA Cup final.

Senior Orangemen in Portadown have rejected calls to re-route Sunday's march away from a nationalist area as the province braces itself for a weekend of tension and potential violence.

The Irish government yesterday stepped up pressure for a new IRA ceasefire in the wake of Labour's landslide election win in Britain.

The women's coalition is speaking up for consensus amid Unionist rancour, says David McKittrick

Sir: Having seen the photograph of Thornton's chocolate representations of party leaders in The Independent on 7 March, I visited my local branch to buy some. A member of staff informed me that there had been no demand for them, and they had been returned to England.

Billy Wright, who as "King Rat" has been the most public face of militant loyalist extremism in Northern Ireland, was yesterday jailed for eight years for threatening to kill a woman.

Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams said last night that the onus was on the British and Irish governments to resolve the issue of contentious loyalist parades in Northern Ireland.

Tim Collins, the Conservative Central Office media guru who claimed the credit for John Major's victory at the last election, and who is now masterminding the Government's by-election disaster in Wirral South, really must learn to engage brain and mouth simultaneously.

The Drumcree Orangemen must be allowed to march down Portadown's Catholic Garvaghy Road next July, the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble has insisted.

Ulster Unionist MPs are highly unlikely to lend their weight to any push to get rid of the Government, seeing little or no political advantage in hastening the election of a Labour government.

Barring an accident of proportions that even John Major should avoid, Labour's effort to terminate this government is likely to fail. When the House of Commons votes tomorrow to censure Douglas Hogg, the hapless Minister of Agriculture, some Ulster Unionists will not bother to vote. Without the backing of the Unionists, Tony Blair cannot even get a tie in the Commons. That means no vote of confidence to follow, and probably guarantees two more months for Mr Major. But why has a Northern Ireland party, whose constituents have been hit so hard by the BSE crisis, come to Mr Major's aid? The answer lies in a blend of high and low politics which may, ultimately, be to the detriment of Unionism.

The Conservatives and the Labour Party are engaged in an auction for the support of the Ulster Unionists in tomorrow night's House of Commons vote of censure on Agriculture Minister Douglas Hogg over his handling of the BSE crisis.

Labour is planning a vote of no confidence in the Government if the Conservatives lose the Wirral South by-election - a threat that could force John Major to opt for an early election.

Funny how those of our fellow citizens who are most keen to assert their British kinship seem most alien to the majority of us. David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionists, whose cause is that his people are our people, sometimes appears on our television screens as a reasonable man, a modern democratic politician. Last summer he appeared in a country scene, by a country church, in a part of what looked very much like our green and pleasant land. But he had come to Drumcree to put himself at the head of a mob engaged in intimidation, in a situation that seemed entirely foreign.