Northern Ireland Secretary Sir Chris Bryant, who returned from the Labour Party conference for talks on Sunday, urged both sides to “double down on compromise”.
He said “nobody should be attending an unlawful protest”, but he added it was not his job “to decide whether somebody has or hasn’t broken the law”.
Breandán Mac Cionnaith, from the Garvaghy Road Residents Coalition, spoke to protesters at midnight.
He told them: “We’ve stopped them once. The process now is to ensure we stop them permanently.”
He said he was meeting the secretary of state and chief constable on Monday, and that he would not prejudge those conversations.
Nigel Dawson, who is the Orange Order’s Portadown district master, told BBC News NI there was frustration.
He said they had a legal right to parade down the Garvaghy Road and the police should facilitate their route.
On Monday, the Portadown district called for the resignation of the Chief Constable Jon Boutcher and Assistant Chief Constable Ryan Henderson.
“The chief constable has treated this community with disdain, flatly refused to uphold our rights, and most shockingly of all has approached this matter, which is at its core a conflict between the lawful and the unlawful, as something requiring resolution,” they said.
Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MP Carla Lockhart, who came back to Drumcree in the early hours of Monday, said the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s chief constable needed “to take a grip of this very quickly or his position will become untenable”.
