Democratic Unionist leader Gavin Robinson accused Bryant of bowing to a threat of violence from Irish Republican Army militants who featured prominently within the Garvaghy Road crowd. Most IRA members have observed a cease-fire since 1997 and officially disarmed in 2005, but several small factions still plot occasional bomb and gun attacks.

Robinson said Northern Ireland’s unionists “know that this British government has bent the knee to them.”

But Bryant said his decision to bar the Orangemen — despite a decision last month by the region’s independent Parades Commission to permit a heavily restricted march by 35 Orangemen — had so far kept violence at bay.

“I utterly reject the charge that I have in any way succumbed to mob rule. The truth is, things have actually passed remarkably peacefully,” he said, adding: “I don’t think anybody seriously proposed that the police should drag people off the street.”

He spoke hours after two courts in Northern Ireland tangled with the conflict of rights stirred up by the revival of the Orange marching demands in Portadown, a sectarian dispute that triggered bloodshed and rioting across Northern Ireland in the mid-1990s.

The Court of Appeal, overseen by Northern Ireland’s highest judge, rejected a lawsuit by the Garvaghy Road protesters seeking to challenge the original Parades Commission ruling. Orange supporters said this judgment kept the door open for an eventual parade down Garvaghy Road for the first time since 1997, when police backed by British soldiers forced the parade through with the use of armored vehicles and volleys of plastic bullets.