The Faithful Tribe
An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions

RUTH DUDLEY EDWARDS

Dedication

To all my friends in the loyal institutions and especially to Henry (who dragged me into this in the first place), Lorraine, Erin and Thomas, my Northern Ireland family, who made researching this book such a joy.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1. Eight Parades, a Cancellation and Some Anthropological Notes from the War-zone

2. What Members of the Irish Loyal Institutions Do

3. Onlookers, Participants and Opponents: the Twelfth

4. The Family Abroad

5. The Wars of Religion Begin

6. ‘Oranje boven!’

7. ‘The Orange Quadrilateral’

8. ‘Conceived and brought forth by humble men’

9. A Century in the Life of a Lodge

10. Villains and Heroes

11. Ourselves Alone

12. The Rise of the Residents’ Groups

13. The Background to Drumcree

14. Drumcree One, 9–11 July 1995

15. The Road to Drumcree Two

16. The Drumcree Disaster, 7–11 July 1996

17. The Road to Drumcree Three: William Bingham’s Story

18. Drumcree Three: The Rest of the Story

19. Drumcree Four, 5 July 1998–?

Afterword

Appendix: Draft Speech for the Prime Minister

Select Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

List of Illustrations

1. Royal Black Preceptory No 800, Clogher, County Tyrone, circa 1930.

2. Tom Reid (as baby) at his first Twelfth, Fivemiletown, County Tyrone, 1934.

3. Banter at ‘The Field’, Ballymoney, County Antrim, August 1989. (JFA Studio)

4. The annual re-enactment of the Battle of the Boyne at Scarva, County Down. (Bobbie Hanvey)

5. Making Lambeg drums in Belfast. (JFA Studio)

6. Three generations of the Brownlees family, Ballymena, County Antrim. (Bobbie Hanvey)

7. ‘If Northern Ireland Was Really “British”…’ (Martyn Turner/Irish Times)

8. Henry, Erin and Thomas Reid outside the Orange Hall in Glenageeragh, County Tyrone, 1995.

9. Gerard Rice of the Lower Ormeau Concerned Community. (MSI)

10. Donncha MacNiallis of the Bogside Residents’ Group. (Belfast Telegraph)

11. Martin McGuinness and Breandán MacCionnaith walk the Garvaghy Road. (Dan Chung/Reuters)

12. Robert Saulters, Grand Master. (MSI)

13. Press Conference at Craigavon, County Armagh, 27 June 1997. (Belfast Telegraph)

14. Garvaghy Road, County Armagh, 6 July 1997. (John Giles/?? News)

15. Apprentice Boys Pageant, Londonderry, August 1997. (Mark Stakem)

16. RUC versus loyalists in Derry, aftermath of Apprentice Boys Parade, 1997. (Mark Stakem)

17. Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness at rally following Belfast anti-internment march, August 1997. (Mark Stakem)

18. Chinook picking up soldiers from field above Drumcree church, 10 July, 1998. (Max Nash/Associated Press)

19. Joel Patton and his supporters occupying the House of Orange in protest against the leadership, December 1997. (MSI)

20. Protest march in Sandy Row, 6 July 1998. (Belfast Telegraph)

21. Funeral of Jason, Mark and Richard Quinn, July 1998. (Pacemaker)

22. Harold Gracey in his caravan at Drumcree, January 1999. (Martin McCullough)

Introduction

When I go to Northern Ireland, I’m looking back to my youth in the 1950s. I remember in Sheffield on Whit Monday when Protestant Sunday schools used to parade to a service and Boys’ Brigade, sea scouts, boy scouts, cubs, brownies, girl guides – scores of children walking past behind a banner carried by some adult. And we all used to go along and the preachers used to preach and everybody used to walk around talking to people you’d not seen for a year. I remember that from my boyhood and see a resonance of it in Northern Ireland. They are to some extent recreating the old virtues of family, sobriety, self-reliance, hard work and thrift.

It’s the Blue Remembered Hills: you can’t go back. We can all see that community and experience a sense of loss – because we know where we’ve come from. But it makes me feel angry that an entire community should be demonized for no greater crime than being out of fashion.

English Orangeman

AT AN ANGLO-IRISH CONFERENCE in 1996, I was standing in the bar with two Northern Irish Orangemen when a third came up and said: ‘I spent an hour last night explaining to X and Y [two intelligent and sophisticated members of the Dáil, the Irish parliament] why I’m an Orangeman. One of them has just bounced over to me and said: “We’ve been talking about you, and we’ve all decided that you can’t be an Orangeman. You’re too nice.” ‘ To which the second Orangeman replied: ‘I was in Dublin a while ago when someone in the group I was with who knew me quite well said: “Why don’t you tell those awful Orangemen to stop those parades?” When I explained that I was an Orangeman, they all said, “You’re not.” I said, “I am,” and they said, “You’re not.” “But I am.” “You’re not. You’re not. You’re not.” So I said, “OK. Have it your way. Obviously when I think I parade through Belfast in a collarette on the Twelfth of July I’m suffering from delusions.” ‘ And the third Orangeman, who had always believed the southern Irish mind was so closed it was a waste of time trying to explain anything, said, ‘There you are! What did I tell you?’

I spring from a southern Roman Catholic, nationalist tradition myself, but over the decades, I have become aware of my tribe’s effrontery and laziness of mind where Northern Protestants, particularly Orangemen, are concerned. ‘Why doesn’t the British government stop those dreadful bigots from strutting through nationalist areas?’ is the cry from people who’ve never met an ordinary Orangeman. And with the next breath they say that unionists have no culture worth talking about.

During the past few years, as I researched this book, I have met hundreds of members of the loyal institutions: the Apprentice Boys, the Orange Order and the Royal Black Institution. I have never known a community as misrepresented and traduced. In their pride and inflexibility, though, they have certainly given plenty of ammunition to their enemies. But then the qualities that enable people to endure a life under siege are not those that make for intellectual nimble-footedness and a talent for public relations.

Most members of the loyal institutions are ordinary, decent people, many of whom have endured extraordinary fear and suffering without becoming bitter. Many are among the finest people I have ever met and live lives that are an inspiring witness to their faith. And others, of course, are very bigoted and nasty.

Along the way I’ve asked Orangemen here and there what they hoped might emerge from my book. I enjoyed most the suggestion from the English Orangeman Mike Phelan, (who gave me the run of his library and his unpublished work on English Orangeism) that it should prove conclusively that compared to Orangemen the Knights of the Round Table were cornerboys. I’ve failed to do that, I’m afraid, but I hope I may have made some headway in satisfying some of my other advisers, like Henry Reid, who told me my job was to give an idea of the spirit of the ordinary Orangeman. Graham Montgomery elaborated: ‘I’d like it to show that Orangemen are just men and Orangewomen just women – just people. And that they can be terribly cultured people who go to the opera or holiday abroad or can be terribly pedestrian and watch the football and eat chips and watch Coronation Street and go to Newcastle for a short break. That they can be ministers or businessmen or lawyers or teachers or farmers or factory-workers – or, like Dr Barnardo, be philanthropists. That they cover the whole gamut of life in any society. That there’s something about the Orange that everybody, even outsiders, can identify with in some way. And that the Orange Order is something we’re involved in in our leisure time – something important enough for us to actually create leisure time for it.’

The Reverend Brian Kennaway added that he’d want the book to show that the Orange Order ‘is about more than parades; the perception in England and abroad is Orange Order equals parade. We are a people with our own identity and our own moral values, and we express those values within our institution. But we are also a people with a tradition and with rights and we are in the forefront of civil rights. Every Orange banner is a civil rights banner.’

Along the way, in trying to understand why members of the loyal institutions think as they do, I’ve had to acquire an understanding of the differences within Protestantism, get a grip on several centuries of European religious wars, look at Irish history from the perspective of besieged settlers rather than of the angry dispossessed and at British history from the perspective of the Puritan rather than the Cavalier. I’ve come to appreciate the virtues of a way of life that would never suit me. To anyone who believes that I am looking at Orangeism from too positive a perspective, I can say only that that is what I do in all my books: my biography of James Connolly, for instance, is sympathetic too, and I am neither republican nor socialist.

I have been much enriched by the whole experience. But I now know without a shadow of doubt that what we have on the island of Ireland are two tribes who might be from two different planets and that no amount of rhetoric will change that reality, however unpalatable it may be to wishful thinkers. It is not until men of violence give them the chance to learn mutual trust that the tribal mentality can be overcome and people can let go of the hatreds of the past.

For the most part, the tribes can be defined as being Protestant/unionist or Catholic/nationalist, though there are significant numbers of Catholics who are happy to remain part of the British state and a handful of Protestants who have become Irish nationalists.

I’ve interviewed many of the leaders of the loyal institutions, but I’ve been just as interested in hearing the views of innumerable foot-soldiers and their spouses. I can’t mention all those who helped me and there are, sadly, others, particularly in the border areas, who do not wish to be acknowledged in case they or their families are in consequence put at greater risk from thugs and terrorists from either side. But since they are readily identifiable anyway, I will mention the Reverend William Bingham and Janet, Edwin and Gail Boyd, Harrison and Beryl Boyd, Eric Brown, Bertie Campbell, the Charlton family, George Chittick, Johnny Cowan, Tony Crowe, Richard Dallas, Gerry Douglas, Tommy Doyle, Sammy Foster, Jackie Hewitt, Jack Hunter, Roy Kells, the Reverend Brian Kennaway and Liz, Alfred and Charlie Kenwell, Cecil Kilpatrick, Warren Loan, Gordon Lucy, Jim McBride, John McCrea, Lexie McFeeter, Chris and Joyce McGimpsey, Derek Miller, Lord Molyneaux, Gordon, Graham and Heather Montgomery, the late Jack Moore, Billy Moore, Noel Mulligan, Dave Packer, George Patten, Mike and Sue Phelan, the Reverend Warren Porter, Tom and Louie Reid, Bobby Saulters, Alistair Simpson, the Reverend Martin Smyth, David and Daphne Trimble, Denis Watson, Richard Whitten, Ian Wiggins and James Wilson. I am grateful also to Ian Black, Charles Fenton, David Griffin, the Reverend Gordon McMullan, Ian Wilson, Frederick and Betty Stewart, Cephas Tay, Hilton Wickham and all the other delegates to the Imperial Council who gave so much help. To all those other Orangemen and Apprentice Boys who gave me their time and trust, I give my thanks. It has been a privilege to be welcomed into a community as you have welcomed me and to know that you expect of me only that I tell the truth as I see it.

Among the non-Orange people to whom I owe thanks are Brian Walker, who took me to my first bonfire, and to various parade companions, especially Karen Davies, Rhondda Donnaghy, Bridget and Emily Hourican, Hugh Jordan, Shelly Kang, Gary Kent, Steven King, Gus Legge, John Lloyd, Paul Le Druillenec, Jenny McCarthey, Gerry McLoughlin, Úna O’Donoghue, Paddy O’Gorman, Priscilla Ridgway, Mark and Margot Stakem and James Tansley. I’m grateful too to the many friends who put up with me despite thinking I must be mad to have embarked on a project that took me away so often to squelch through mud in the company of religiously-minded men in bowler hats who keep making a fuss about walking down roads. ‘Oh, God, you’re not going Orangeing again, are you? Be careful,’ was the usual line. I’m particularly grateful, though, to the friends who listened, even if not always sympathetically, to what I reported back or those who told me I was doing something useful. Special mention must be made of two beloved and encouraging friends, Niall Crowley and Jill Neville, who died while I was working on the book, and of Paul Bew, Chaz Brenchley, Stephen Cang, Maírín Carter, Nina Clarke, Betsy Crabtree, Robert Cranborne, Colm de Barra, Barbara Sweetman Fitzgerald, Dean Godson, Graham Gudgeon, Blair Hall, Rory Hanrahan, Eoghan Harris, Kate Hoey, Eamonn Hughes, Sylvia Kalisch, Mary Keen, Liam Kennedy, Kathryn Kennison, Kuku Khanna, Janet Laurence, Gordon Lee, John Lippitt, Robin Little, Jim and Lindy McDowell, James McGuire, Janet McIver, John and Elizabeth Midgley, Sean O’Callaghan, Eoin O’Neachtain, Henry Robinson, Des Smith, Oliver Snoddy, Veronica Sutherland, Bert Ward, Julia Wisdom and my niece Neasa MacErlean. And Martin Mansergh kindly gave me the benefit of his researches into the Orange Order.

I am very grateful to David Armstrong, editor of the Portadown Times, Graham Montgomery, Sean O’Callaghan, Mike Phelan and Henry Reid for reading and commenting on the typescript. Along with Brian Kennaway, Graham, Mike and Henry have been the Orangemen on whom I have most relied throughout the last few years for help, hospitality, wit and honest answers to innumerable difficult questions. James McGuire, an historian of the seventeenth-century and one of the few southern Catholics I know who has close friendships with Ulster Protestants, has been the non-Orange equivalent. My brother Owen, who is notoriously generous with his time and his scholarship, took tremendous trouble, picked up several errors, filled in several gaps and engaged for about eight hours on the telephone in healthy disagreement with me about certain passages – most of which I amended. Not only is he exceptionally well informed about the subject, but his Catholic perspective was a very useful corrective: I greatly appreciate his support and encouragement.

It was Alan Ruddock, who as Irish editor of the Sunday Times first gave me space to write about the Orange Order, and Aengus Fanning and Willie Kealy of the Sunday Independent who have since he left been my main indulgere. I quote from or use here articles of mine in both papers as well in the Belfast Newsletter, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph, Irish Times, Portadown Times and Spectator.

Michael Fishwick of HarperCollins took me to lunch to discuss a completely different project, listened to my babbling about Drumcree, and said: ‘That’s what you’re really interested in. Why not write a book about the Orangemen?’ Not only was he invariably sympathetic and helpful, but he did not even raise an eyebrow when he was given a typescript which was twice the length agreed. He was lucky that time did not permit me to do a proper job on Orangewomen or juniors, not to speak of the Orange Order abroad. My agent, Felicity Bryan, wanted me to do something far more sensible, but she gritted her teeth and as always, backed me up. The HarperCollins team including Janet Law, Phyllis Richardson, Prue Jeffreys and Moira Reilly, did me proud and my editor, Kate Johnson, who came late and over-worked to the project, was a pleasure to deal with and always laughed rather than cried.

But the name of my assistant, Carol Scott, should lead all the rest. Not only did she, as usual, look after me with patience and humour, but she listened to my stories, sympathized with the sufferings of my troubled Orange friends and readily accepted that Orangemen are people too. I hope others will show a similarly open mind.

1
Eight Parades, a Cancellation and Some Anthropological Notes from the War-zone

I CAME TO THE LOYAL institutions bringing with me all the unconscious prejudices I had imbibed during a Dublin Roman Catholic* childhood and a secular adulthood in London. The best way of explaining how my views have changed is to give my own parading history; so here is a cross-section of the dozens of parades, big and small, that I have attended. I have tried to show how my assumptions and attitudes changed along the way, so where I wrote at the time about a parade, I quote relevant extracts here.

1. Belfast, 13 July 1987

At the time I was chairman of the British Association for Irish Studies (BAIS) which, inter alia, sought to give public expression to all aspects of Irish history, politics and culture. Protestant and unionist perspectives received a decent airing at our conferences and public lectures, but we had never heard a positive view of Orangeism – a closed, unreadable and rather distasteful book to most academics. (‘For all I know about Orangemen after twenty years of living and working in Belfast,’ said an English academic friend to me recently, ‘they could live in burrows in the Glens of Antrim.’) So I thought I had better go and look at a Twelfth of July parade and see if I could understand what was going on.

Orangeism to me then represented thuggish, stupid, sectarian bigotry. I had a vague feeling that Orangemen were mainly working-class, and that aspiring unionist politicians cynically donned the Orange sash to help them get elected. People on the Anglo-Irish scene occasionally passed on the information that all unionist MPs, with the exception of Ken Maginnis, were in the Orange Order. Since Maginnis was and is a well-known liberal and one of the few unionist leaders to have friends in the Republic of Ireland, this was added evidence that Orangeism was for bigots only. It was ten years before I learned that Maginnis was in fact a member of a loyal institution with an even rougher reputation: the Apprentice Boys.

Northern nationalist friends spoke of the fear that gripped them on the Twelfth of July; middle-class Protestants and Catholics alike talked of how they always got out of town for the Twelfth and a Catholic friend from Portadown did a highly amusing imitation of an Orangeman swaggering along singing ‘On the Green Grassy Slopes of the Boyne’, with a chorus of ‘Fuck the Pope’, in which we all merrily joined.

It was sobering that no one wanted to go with me. Family and friends in London thought it another of my aberrations to want to look at a lot of dreary and possibly dangerous men stomping along in bowler hats and probably rioting. And my Northern Irish friends refused out of hand, except for one Protestant with an interest in political culture who agreed to take me to a bonfire on the night before the parade. Fortunately, my Dublin friend Úna is indulgent and adventurous, so she agreed to go north.

On an impulse, when I arrived in Belfast on Friday, I looked up the Orange Order in the phone book and presented myself at the House of Orange in Dublin Road. I was making a point for the sake of it: I expected to be greeted with distrust if not hostility. Instead I was given a friendly welcome by George Patten, the executive secretary.

I explained about the BAIS and asked some basic questions about how much work had been done on Orange history. What were the chances of an outsider ever being allowed access to Orange archives? I asked idly. George Patten shook his head. He was all for objective history, he said, but he couldn’t imagine the Order trusting an outsider.

Emboldened by his friendliness, I explained that Úna and I wanted to see the parade on Monday and that, being Dublin Catholics, we didn’t know where to go or what to do. Had he any advice on where we should sit? And how would we find out what was going on? Explaining that he himself would not be in Belfast, for he would be on parade in the country, Patten summoned a colleague who told me where we would have the best view: he would come and brief us for a while in the morning preparatory to joining his lodge.

I loved the tour of enormous bonfires on Sunday night. Perhaps I should have been offended that effigies of the Irish and British prime ministers were being burned as a protest against the Anglo-Irish Agreement, but I wasn’t. I had been rather uneasy that the two governments had made a deal without consulting unionists and that a mass demonstration of a quarter-of-a-million Protestants had been virtually ignored. Considering the massive sense of betrayal throughout the unionist community, burning effigies seemed a harmless way of letting off steam.

The following morning Úna and I seated ourselves on the pavement opposite Sandy Row – which I knew by repute as a street down which any Catholic went at his peril – and were soon surrounded by families and picnic baskets. There then arrived a contingent of five or six nasty-looking young men with tattoos, militaristic haircuts and rasping Glaswegian accents. They were carrying cartons of beer. It was a hot day and looked like being a long one so I nerved myself to ask where they had procured their supplies. ‘Sandy Row,’ they explained. It is a testimony to the insane levels of media exaggeration and extreme nationalist propaganda that I really thought that in the middle of the morning I was running a serious risk in exposing my Southern Irish accent in a Sandy Row off-licence, but I did, and only pride got me to my feet. The alcohol-buyers were a pretty rough-looking bunch, but everyone was perfectly civil.

When our guide arrived in his regalia, he explained a few basic essentials: that LOL on a banner or a sash meant Loyal Orange Lodge, that the numbers were originally related to the lodge’s seniority, and that temperance lodges were not necessarily composed of teetotallers but of people who disapproved of getting drunk. He told us that, contrary to what he understood was Catholic mythology, Lambeg drums were not made from the skin of Catholics but of goats. He stayed for about twenty minutes and then suddenly said goodbye and vanished into the middle of a group of men who looked indistinguishable from all the rest.

Úna and I had a good time. We sipped our beer and listened to the music and marvelled at the noise and colour and spectacle and tried to understand the banners. We took pleasure in the enjoyment evinced by the people all around us. I found the whole thing absolutely unthreatening except for some fife-and-drum bands composed of dangerous-looking young men, several of which, it was explained to me afterwards, came from Scotland. I felt uneasy, though, at the sight of small children wearing collarettes or band uniforms which, at the time, I took to indicate that they were being brainwashed in sectarian practices.

My martial blood was stirred by now and I was on for walking the five miles to Edenderry Field where the parade was heading, but Úna decreed lunch so we cheated and went later to the field by taxi. Even so, we were in time to walk up the lane for ten minutes with the last of the parade behind the Portadown True Blues, a tough-looking crew in military-style uniforms who nevertheless played with a verve that put a spring in one’s step. And when we reached the field we saw the arresting sight of hundreds of bandsmen and some Orangemen facing the hedgerows in a virtual semi-circle relieving themselves. Young fife-and-drum bandsmen, it was explained to me later, drink a lot of beer before and after parades.

We steered well clear of the platform and the speeches, skirted the picnicking Orangemen and their families and headed for the stalls. Having acquired red-and-white flags and hats saying ‘Keep Ulster British’ and ‘Ulster says No’, respectively waving and wearing them, we had our photograph taken at a stall and converted into keyrings. And when we had run out of amusements we headed back down the lane to find the taxi we had prudently booked to take us back to the city centre.

The ironic postscript came that evening in a restaurant. At the table next to us were half-a-dozen women having a very merry dinner with much wine and laughter. When we fell into conversation we found they were celebrating having made a vast amount of money running food stalls at Edenderry. They did this every year. And they were all Catholics.

2. Belfast, 12 July 1994

It was seven years before I went back, this time as a journalist with guinea-pigs in tow: Priscilla, an American Protestant, and, from Dublin, Bridget and Emily Hourican, Catholic university students. In Belfast, on the eve of the Twelfth, we were briefed by academic and political friends over dinner. The mood was sombre to begin with. In the hope of provoking retaliation, the IRA had murdered a prominent loyalist and riddled with bullets the house of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MP, the Reverend Willie McCrae. Later we cheered up. I was a great deal less ignorant about Northern Ireland now, yet I was amazed to hear from the McGimpseys, Orangeman Chris and Orangewoman Joyce, that they saw the Order as predominantly a social organization; Joyce waxed eloquent about the socials and dances.

We repaired late to a couple of massive bonfires, built communally in Protestant areas over several days with anything from cardboard to obsolete refrigerators; large numbers of people stood around drinking and making amiable chat. My contingent were in merry form by then and disappointed that there was insufficient carousing. They learned the words of ‘No Pope of Rome’, which was being played in the background and is an old favourite of mine. It is elegiac, a kind of Orange aisling,* a vision of what life might be in a Utopian Northern Ireland, though, like most modern hard-line sectarian songs, it was composed in Scotland. Sung to the tune of ‘Home on the Range’, the chorus runs:

No, no Pope of Rome,

No chapels† to sadden my eye, No nuns and no priests, No rosary beads, Every day’s like the Twelfth of July. I wrote afterwards:

When I last saw the parade, it was in blazing sunshine. This time it poured with rain. We collected our beer from the Sandy Row off-licence and settled on a stone wall nearby, now augmented by Gus Legge, a University College Dublin engineering student and Hourican friend who had been fired by their example to come up from Dublin independently. The first differences emerged over the paraphernalia. Priscilla, Emily and I were happy as a gesture of courtesy to wear King Billy or Ulster Flag hats and wave Union Jacks; Bridget balked at the flag but wore a hat and carried a baton decorated in red, white and blue. Gus eschewed all insignia; he felt they had political overtones and would not have waved their republican equivalents. However, he did graciously accept from me the present of a keyring which on one side said ‘Keep Ulster Tidy’ and on the other ‘Throw your litter in the Irish Republic’.*

I love the parade. I love the music; if you’ve never heard the Eton Boating Song played by fife and drum, you haven’t lived. I love the daftness of some of the decorations. Ferociously muscly chaps bash drums adorned with politically-chosen flowers – orange tiger lilies or sweet william. I love trying to work out why in several groups just a few will have red or white carnations in their bowler hats. Are they office-holders in the lodge? Are some of the bowlers rounder than some of the others for significant reasons, or has a hatter gone out of business? Why was one bowler sporting a fern and another a sprig of heather? And why were not more of them sprouting the tiny plastic Union Jacks?

I love the banners – the pictures, the variety, the often baffling biblical, Irish and Scottish historical references. I love the eclecticism of a parade that includes lodges called Ark of Freedom, Rev. W. Maguire Memorial Total Abstinence, Prince Albert Temperance, Prince of Orange, Mountbatten, Martyrs of the Grassmarket – Edinburgh, True Blues of the Boyne, Martyrs Memorial (the name of Ian Paisley’s church, though he is in fact in the Independent Orange Order†), the Queen Elizabeth Accordion Band, the Rising Sons of India, the Defenders, the Protestant Boys and the Loyal Sons of County Donegal. Contemporary politics was occasionally in evidence, with a clip-on ‘NO DUBLIN INTERFERENCE’ attached to a handful of banners. ‘I didn’t know there were that many Prods in Ireland,’ observed Priscilla.

I love the taxis. They arrived at infrequent intervals, decorated according to the enthusiasm of the proprietor with anything from a single Union Jack to full regalia – King Billy banners, large flags, bunting and a multiplicity of political flowers. Their purpose was threefold: to transport Orangemen too old or frail to march with their lodges, drums too heavy for anyone to carry for five miles and also to pick up those who faltered along the route. I loved the moment when a dogged aged marcher dropped out, still smiling bravely, hailed an oncoming taxi uncertainly and was eventually assisted by a functionary who stopped the cab and the entire procession and helped him in. The fact that such a disciplined parade would stop unexpectedly to accommodate a falterer was typical of the humanity of the whole event. There was even a wheelchair.

I love the daft mix of clothes. From the ultra-disciplined – flute bands in vulgar brightly-coloured uniforms which depending on your perception were quasi-military, ocean-liner steward or cinema usher, complete with little caps with tassels, epaulettes and the lot – through kilts, trews, tam o’shanters, Californian drum majorettes’ uniforms, complete with short skirts, white socks and white shoes, older women in sensible skirts and stout shoes, chaps with ponytails, chaps in shirt-sleeves, one man in a dinner-jacket, to the most familiar image – the men in suits and bowlers with the sashes. There were people carrying pikes, staves, batons, drums, pipes, flutes, tin whistles and umbrellas. Then there were the kids who ranged from five-year-olds of both sexes in full uniform at the head of a lodge to various tracksuited individuals or toddlers in dresses and waterproof jackets holding on to banner-cords. A few people had their faces painted red, white and blue; several others opted for coloured hair, which in a surprising number of instances ended up green.

I love the lack of ageism. The fact that, apparently unselfconsciously, lodges could accommodate marchers from toddlers to totterers.

I love the fact that they are terrifically disciplined for the first mile or so, while the TV cameras are on them; in fact, when they catch sight of them, there is extra special twirling of batons, straighter shoulders and even more histrionics on the drums.

I love the signs of fraying of tempers when they got to the third mile and were soaked through. In one accordion band the girls got stroppy with their male leaders and a full-scale rebellion about what was to be played next had to be resolved. In mixed bands like this you could especially see the social importance of the Orange Order. Joining the Sandy Row Prince of Orange Accordion Band must be the local equivalent of joining the Young Conservatives in Surrey.

I love the fact that there was much chatting with the crowd once the heat was off, that people like us were intent on locating those we knew and shouting and waving at them – it was an important form of recognition. We swelled with pride when we spotted a McGimpsey and received a wave.

I love their dogged varieties of stoicism in the face of the cruel weather. Some sported umbrellas; accordion-players perforce had to wear plastic cloaks to protect their instruments; other defiantly wore shirt-sleeves in downpours that had my contingent whingeing and fighting over our golf umbrella. Not only did they finish the march, but most of them stayed in Edenderry, with little to amuse but hamburger and fish-and-chip stalls, and a platform of dignitaries. When we left, the officiating clergyman had attracted an audience of only about thirty-five. Everyone else was hanging around hoping that the rain would stop, the mud would dry up and they could do what they normally did – sit on the grass, play music, drink beer and sing, until it was time to regroup and march back the five miles to Belfast city centre.

I love marching along with the parade, which we did after an hour or so in order to get warm. My choice was the Unthank Road Flute Band. And when you get into the rhythm, you understand the importance of military music.

Priscilla and Emily enjoyed themselves in the same way as I did, but Bridget and Gus did not. Bridget hates parades anyway and, like Gus, thought this one militaristic. Neither likes fife-and-drum music. There was some wistful longing for Spanish fiestas or West Indian carnivals. Priscilla caused a rethink by pointing out that this event was greatly similar to the Ancient Order of Hibernians’ St Patrick’s Day parade in New York, with the pipe bands, the IRA veterans and the marching Irish police in Sam Browne belts. It was agreed that because the South was unused to military trappings, it was possible to see militarism where it was not intended. What received general agreement in the end was that the parade was an expression of pride in the community and that is no bad thing.

Tiny signs of tribalism were accentuated by walking down the Falls and the Shankill. The very secular Priscilla suddenly went seriously Protestant in the Shankill Road. Here, she said, were the besieged, not the besiegers; it was a clenched-teeth community. It was a reversion to family type. ‘If there have been Catholics in the family, it has never been mentioned,’ she explained.

Bridget and Emily went slightly the other way, mainly because of their shock at the World Cup-related graffiti. Having been actively involved in World Cup mania in Dublin and having adored the carnival atmosphere, it passed their understanding that anyone in Northern Ireland would not have been on the side of the Ireland team. The comments on the Ireland-Holland match were bad enough: 1690 ORANGEMEN 1–0; 1994 ORANGEMEN 2–0’; ‘PACKIE BUTTERFINGERS LET IT IN THE NET’. ‘But we’d have supported Northern Ireland if they’d got through,’ said the Houricans. ‘Not the point,’ said the newly politicized Priscilla. ‘Being besieged leads to aggression.’ And that was before we saw the comment on the Ireland – Italy match and the Loghlinisland public-house massacre: ‘HOUGHTON HIT THE NET 1–0; UVF HIT THE BAR 6–0’.

Gus felt no tribal signals. He felt more at ease in the Falls simply because there a southern accent would be an advantage, but he was depressed by both roads and the multiplicity of ‘For Sale’ signs, suggesting hopeless attempts to get out.

Everyone loved the people they met from both communities and their great friendliness and were delighted when a Protestant taxi-driver said with pleasure, ‘I wouldn’t have expected youse people from Dublin to come up and wave on the parade.’ Bridget was particularly pleased at the elderly Orangemen who said to her in the field, ‘Wish you were the leader of my lodge.’

A detour on the way home via Crossmaglen yielded an impressive tribute to the British passion for freedom of speech, for signs which I had seen a year ago were still in place: ‘BRITISH TERRORISTS GO HOME’ and, surrounding a sketch of a chap in a balaclava, ‘2ND BATTALION – VICTORY TO THE PROVOS’.

Priscilla has returned to America determined to recommend the event to her Irish acquaintances, and the Dublin contingent is evangelical. A coachload can be expected next year.

3. Aughnacloy, 23 August 1995

As a result of that and other articles about Northern Ireland, I received an invitation out of the blue from a County Tyrone farmer the following year to come to the Clogher Valley, stay at his house and attend ‘the Last Saturday in August demonstration with RBP No. 800’. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I was so stunned at being invited to anything by an unknown Ulster Protestant that I cut short a highly convivial holiday in Clare. ‘I’m going to some kind of Orange march in the country,’ I said to a Southern Irish friend who worked for peace and reconcilation in Northern Ireland. ‘You must be mad,’ she said. ‘I’d rather cut my throat than go to an Orange march.’

Henry, my host, had decided that it was time – post-Drumcree One – for at least one journalist to attend an ordinary rural parade as a guest of what turned out to be a preceptory of the Royal Black Institution. Determined I should see it for myself and make up my own mind about it, he gave me little briefing the night before. At around nine the following morning, after his mother had provided us with a vast Ulster fry,* we drove to the little village of Clogher, six miles from the border. It was cold and intermittently showery: Ulster’s is a cruel climate for a culture whose big festival days occur in the open air.

I was led first into the Orange Hall which was shared by what I now knew to be the Royal Black Preceptory and Henry showed me around. A two-storey house, it was dingy, plain and furnished in a decidedly spartan fashion with hard seats and rough trestle-tables. There was a picture of the Queen downstairs and another upstairs, a ceremonial sword and a plush seat for the Worshipful Master. The lavatory and kitchen were tiny and cheerless and there was no hot water. Men rushed in and out exchanging greetings, removing coats and putting on what I thought were black sashes but which are called collarettes, bowler hats and white gloves. The Blackmen,† as they are generally known, pride themselves on being well turned out: indeed, the only daft thing that Henry has ever said to me he said later that day. When he observed on parade a contingent from south of the border who were wanting in the white-glove department, he shook his head and said, ‘Look at them poor craturs there. If we’d been in a United Ireland we’d all be in that state.’

After introducing me to some of his brethren, Henry dispatched me with instructions to wait across the road from the hall, watch them parade round the village and then proceed to the coach to travel to the main parade. Then they assembled, their band struck up and they processed up the village and round and down, watched by no more than perhaps a dozen or so people along the way.

In the coach I was seated next to the Worshipful Master who said he hoped I would come to tea in the hall afterwards and suggested that if I enjoyed a nip of whiskey, I might like to accompany him to the pub afterwards. My enthusiasm for this notion sealed our friendship, and for the rest of the journey we talked about his family. (Ulster people are so cautious of causing affront by seeming nosy that they rarely ask personal questions; during interviews on countless occasions someone would say in response to a question about his religion, ‘I don’t know what your faith is and I wouldn’t ask but I hope I’m not giving offence,’ before going on to say something completely innocuous about his particular religious beliefs.)

Summing up the day in a newspaper article, I wrote:

The Clogher Valley people – who were extraordinarily welcoming – have since been described to me as among the most decent people in Northern Ireland. Dungannon, the local council, is working well on a system of power-sharing between the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP. As one council member explained: ‘For most purposes it’s us and the SDLP [John Hume’s party] against the fascists – the DUP [Ian Paisley’s party] and Sinn Féin.’* And there were many Catholics among the more than 20,000 people who picnicked in cars along the parade route.†

You can’t become an RBP member without having spent two years in the Orange Order. The RBP has a reputation for being the least confrontational of loyal institutions, so I realize that what I saw in Aughnacloy was the most benign face of Orangeism. Of perhaps 90 lodges and bands, only three or four were even faintly intimidating. The exceptions were what are known as the ‘kick-the-pope’* bands of young men from places like Portadown with earrings, shaven heads, vulgar and militaristic uniforms and a triumphalist swagger; in Scotland they would be on the terraces of Glasgow Rangers football club.

I’ve often vaguely wondered exactly what Orangemen do. ‘Sinn Féin think we talk politics and plot,’ said one RBP member. ‘In fact what we do is to have a monthly meeting in our hall to discuss trivial points about increasing the annual dues or repairing the roof; a few times a year we have a dinner. The main reason for going is just to meet your neighbours. And the parades are days out to look forward to.’

It was with a shock of recognition that I realized that, at bottom, the Orange Order is simply a Northern Irish Protestant means of male bonding. In England chaps have their clubs in which they obey arcane rules and organize social occasions. Some are Freemasons – cousins of Orangemen – and wear funny clothes and appear to be sinister because they conduct their proceedings in secret, but are in fact by and large a pretty harmless lot of men who just want an excuse to get out of the house. Irish Catholic men bond in pubs.†

Clogher Valley Protestants are hard-working, God-fearing, sober, frugal but warm people with a fierce pride in the land which many generations of their forefathers made so prosperous. Their RBP headquarters has so far escaped the fate of the almost 100 Orange halls attacked and seriously damaged in the past six years. It is a simple village hall with no creature comforts. The post-parade tea, at which I was made welcome both formally and informally, was – as one of them put it – ‘a country dinner’ of lots of meat and potatoes, and it was dry. But the Worshipful Master took me to the pub afterwards for Irish whiskey and chat with locals.

RBP 800 prided themselves on being well turned-out for the parade, in best suits, bowler hats, sash, mason’s apron and white gloves; the Murley Silver Band with whom they have marched for many years has a smart uniform. Like most of the bands, the Murley men and women are devoted to music-making rather than politics and like many of the other bands has extended its repertoire far beyond ‘The Sash’ and military music; many bands now play the music of that Catholic Derryman, Phil Coulter.*

What is missed in television coverage of these marches is the happy aspect. Old men walk along hand-in-hand with a toddler grandchild; cars follow individual lodges bearing proud but infirm elders; and every time I moved from my marching position beside the band and caught the eye of one of the men from my host lodge, I was awarded a wink or a large beam. Afterwards I said to one of them, ‘Why do you look so serious as you parade?’ He was puzzled. ‘It’s part of the discipline.’

There is a general belief that without the twenty-five years of assault from the IRA, the Orange Order would have almost withered away. The recognition that nationalist spokesmen are wiping the floor with unionists politically and on the media makes the parades a vital means of showing that the Protestants won’t go away. ‘What else have we got?’ asked one. Yet there is a new recognition of the necessity of taking on the nationalists at their own game. ‘We’ve been too stiff-necked and proud to explain ourselves,’ said one. ‘We’ve got to change.’ There is nothing they would like so much in the Clogher Valley as to watch on television the new leader of the Ulster Unionist Party wipe that smile off Gerry Adams’s face.

There were aspects of the day I had no room to put in that article. Such as that my host – who wanted me to know how bad it could be – insisted that we sit on the wet grass and listen to an evangelist who seemed to me to be completely deranged. Or that I was totally baffled that chaps speaking from the platform referred to each other as ‘Sir Knight’. I was baffled too that there was almost no reference to politics: I had a vague impression that all marches ended with a unionist politician going on about the Anglo-Irish Agreement. It was only afterwards that I discovered that the Black was concerned more with the spiritual than the political.

I didn’t mention that I discovered that it was rather fun singing hymns – this was the first of my many attempts at ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ – nor did I refer to the ‘resolutions’ that were proposed at what I had just learned was called a ‘demonstration’. Here are the three listed in the leaflet I was given, which included this instruction about a forthcoming anniversary service: ‘Sir Knights to assemble on the Augher Road beside the Filling Station at 2.45 p.m.’

FIRST RESOLUTION

In pursuit of lasting peace in our land, we stress the need to contend earnestly for the Faith: We urge all Sir Knights to continue to live in harmony with their neighbours and to do all in their power to witness to the saving truths of the everlasting Gospel. We call upon everyone to embrace the Faith once delivered to the Saints and to engage whole-heartedly in the battle against the evil forces so rampant in today’s society.

SECOND RESOLUTION

We, the Members of the Imperial Grand Black Chapter of the British Commonwealth, send our loyal greetings to Her Majesty The Queen. The commemorations of the end of the Second World War enabled the British people to manifest their deep respect for Her Majesty, who has maintained the commitment and duty to Her people as displayed throughout the war by Her Father and Mother, and confirmed their conviction that the Monarchy remains the keystone of our Parliamentary Democracy.

The third one was more foxing. But then I had not yet learned how immediate for many religiously-minded Protestants is the Old Testament.

THIRD RESOLUTION

We applaud the good citizens of Northern Ireland who remained unnerved by the shocks and uncertainties since the cessation of military operations by terrorists.

We regret that little was done to prepare the population for the inevitable confusion similar to that experienced by ancient Israel when released from captivity in Egypt. Unlike them we must remain resolute and ready to take full advantage of favourable developments before the end of the year.

I didn’t mention either, as I didn’t want to hurt Henry’s feelings, that while I understood the attraction of parades, this seemed to me a pretty weird way of enjoying yourself, interesting though I’d found the experience. Nor that living in London where I virtually never hear the national anthem, I was moved by the fervour with which those attending the service sang it at the end. Nor that I greatly enjoyed the warmth of the welcome given in the Orange Hall to a female southern Irish Catholic (albeit an atheist – which, of course, to them is worse) and was touched that the Worshipful Master thanked me formally for bothering to come. I appreciated everyone’s friendliness, liked the atmosphere in the pub and the warmth and the chat of the drinking bandsmen and women and lodge-members. And I was thrilled that RBP No. 800 was now informally my lodge.*

4. Scarva, 13 July 1996

We’d had a very jolly Twelfth the previous day in Kesh. Despite the rise in sectarian bitterness after the events at Drumcree, there had been little to see except the parade and people enjoying themselves in the manner of rural Protestants: a sunny day, ice-cream, picnics, soft drinks, lots of stirring music and chatting to neighbours constituted for them a veritable heaven. My English companions, Gary and Paul, who’d come to a parade for the first time, had had a surprisingly good time; we’d been entertained for lunch at the Orange Hall where, as always, I was the only woman guest, and had a chat with Lord Brookeborough, grandson of a Northern Ireland prime minister and one of the few remaining members of the Ulster gentry still in the Orange Order. He had introduced us to an Orangeman in a wheelchair, an ex-member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, whose legs had been blown off as he helped a Catholic, who was too drunk to walk properly, to get away from a place that was being evacuated. He was a cheerful man who said he had merely done his job, had no bitterness and was grateful to God for having spared him.

Now a friend was taking Gary and Paul and me to a day that a lot of parade-connoisseurs regard as the best spectacle in Northern Ireland: the annual parade of the Armagh Royal Black Preceptories and the Sham Fight.

A Black event is prized by all of those who want to see the loyal institutions at their most disciplined, dignified and responsible. And because of the nature of the Black, a far smaller portion of the bands are ‘blood-and-thunder’. So it’s a splendid outing for accordion, pipe and silver bands. (One of the pleasures of a parade is to see someone I have met socially appear completely transformed. I remember gentle, slightly diffident Eric suddenly appearing in front of me resplendent in his kilt and bagpipes, exuding joy and pride in his band and his community.)

The problem with Scarva is that it has become too popular and the lane down which the parade goes is narrow. If you want to walk along with a band, you have to do so behind the families sitting in their folding chairs or on their blankets, swigging soft drinks and munching sandwiches and cake. Scarva is a bit too respectable and tame to attract yobs although there is sometimes a bit of trouble from the small lager-drinking brigade.

Our day was complicated by my needing to have a word with James Molyneaux, the Imperial Sovereign Grand Master, who was leading the parade. ‘We’ll go through the fields,’ announced our country friend, and took off at speed to lead us over barbed-wire fences and thorn-hedges and across boggy land and through muddy puddles to find Molyneaux before he disappeared into Scarvagh House to dine with the dignitaries. When we finally made it via the back route into the field, it was already full of stalls and Blackmen and bands and families. There was no sign of Molyneaux and the platform was deserted. So I had to climb over yet another fence and go to Scarvagh House.

By this time the Sham Fight between King James II, the loyal institutions’ hate figure, and their hero, King William III, was in train. It is a bizarre and rather touching event, given an emotional context because there is an oak tree in the grounds under which William is supposed to have camped on his way to the Boyne. The following year, when I actually walked the route more or less backwards about twenty yards in front of the parade, I was highly diverted that the leading marshals were a King James and a King William in vaguely period uniform, in green and red respectively, adorned with tricorne hats with appropriate cockades. It rather takes away from the mystique when the two great enemies are engaged in moving bystanders out of harm’s way, but then, except for a little ritual in Orange lodges, mystique is not much prized in that part of the world.

What happens at the Sham Fight is that, when everybody has arrived in the field, King William and his main henchman General Schomberg on the one hand, and King James and General Patrick Sarsfield on the other, appear on horseback to thunderous applause followed by motley footsoldiers more or less dressed for the part. After riding round and round for a while, the kings and generals, still on horseback, fight each other with swords while their followers use swords, pistols with blanks or just generally tussle. The fight – which is supposed to represent the four Williamite Irish battles: Derry, Enniskillen, Aughrim and the Boyne – rages enthusiastically all round the field with much gunshot, shouting, laughter and cheering. By the end of the fight, James’s standard has been destroyed, William’s is held high and James runs away.

That year I couldn’t see a thing. The following year I got the hang of it when I was allowed on the platform. But what I did have was access to the Scarva joke, for I was marooned for quite some time outside the house where Molyneaux was eating, with a Black marshal who was very fond of it. It runs: ‘Who won?’ (or, as he pronounced it, ‘Hee wan?’), a question he addressed to me and about half-a-dozen different people over the next twenty minutes amid his chortles of delighted laughter. I learned that the accepted response is something along the lines of, ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to ask.’

As a spectacle, the Sham Fight is a bit amateurish. ‘They really should call in the Sealed Knot,’ observed a journalist the following year, alluding to a collection of military history buffs who refight the battles of the English Civil War with great attention to accuracy and expertise. But that kind of professionalism would spoil the fun. The Sham Fight is put on by local people for their neighbours and, like them, it is without pretension. It is a homely and reassuringly familiar occasion.

The marshal had been rattled by my request to see Molyneaux, not so much because he was Imperial Sovereign Grand Master and retired Ulster Unionist Party leader, but because he was having his dinner. He was so shocked at the notion that a man might be distracted from feeding even by being passed a message saying, ‘Can I see you when you’re free?’, that though he was a friendly and obliging man, it took half an hour before he could nerve himself to do the deed.

I eventually talked and laughed a bit with Molyneaux, whose public image is dour, but who is a gentle wit, in the hallway of the Victorian house, the light filtering through the stained-glass window representing King William on a white horse; then he and his colleagues decamped to the platform to say prayers, sing hymns, make sensible speeches and move moderate resolutions.

The men were dozing on the grass when I got back. We stayed long enough to listen to Molyneaux’s part of the proceedings and then went off and had some foul hamburgers. Paul looked around the field and pronounced that, apart from the regalia, it was exactly like an English agricultural show. We left early, because if you don’t get back to your car ahead of the parade, it is possible to be stuck behind cars and coaches for an hour. And after all that fresh air and blameless activity, we badly needed beer.

5. The Apprentice Boys, 10 August 1996

I had gone to Derry* the day before with Paul, who had become a parade aficionado, to sightsee and look at the route that was causing such massive arguments. For the preceding weeks and months, horse-trading had been going on to try to gain the agreement of the Bogside Residents’ Group (BRG) to a walk along the city walls by the Apprentice Boys as part of their annual commemoration of the siege of 1689. The institution reveres the thirteen apprentice boys who defied their elders and closed the gates to keep out King James’s army.

Derry is not just the Mecca of the Apprentice Boys, it is their raison d’être. It is a cruel irony for them that it is now almost wholly in nationalist hands: of the 60,000 inhabitants of the city, only 1,500 are Protestant, and they feel vulnerable to what they believe is a policy of ethnic cleansing.

Times were tense. A month before, the volte-face on Drumcree had led to full-scale riots, complete with petrol bombs and plastic bullets, leading to the death of one protester. Alistair Simpson, the Apprentice Boys’ governor, had worked tirelessly to reach agreement with the residents’ group. Unlike the leaders of the Orange Order, who refused to negotiate parade routes with convicted terrorists, he had agreed to meet the leader of the BRG, Donncha MacNiallais.

Simpson and his colleagues had offered various concessions about numbers, about not playing any music as they walked on the part of the walls that overlooked the Bogside, and, in desperation, had suggested that screens be erected so that no Bogside resident would have to see the Apprentice Boys and barbed wire be put in place to ensure no Apprentice Boy could approach the Bogside even if he wanted to. Even so, agreement had proved impossible. As a reporter in the Sinn Féin organ An Phoblacht/Republican News put it: ‘They [the BRG] sought an overall accommodation with the Apprentice Boys involving the acceptance of the principle of consent for all contentious parades, wherever and by whomever they were organized. This the Apprentice Boys were unable to deliver, and talks broke down over the issue.’ From Simpson’s point of view, MacNiallais had moved the goalposts beyond reach.

To pre-empt trouble, on Wednesday the Secretary of State had banned the parade from the contentious part of the walls and had moved troops in to seal them off. In a particularly surreal contribution, a Bogside resident was quoted the following day in An Phoblacht/Republican News. ‘Why are they creating a screened walkway? … The suspicion is that they are to be used to allow the march to go ahead outside the view of residents.’

When I met the gentle and courteous Alistair Simpson on the Friday, he was still depressed by the last meeting he had had with MacNiallais and the insults he had had to endure and he was apprehensive about the build-up of frustration among the Apprentice Boys, but he was confident he would find a way to avert violence.

Friday afternoon was enlivened by seeing in action in front of the Guildhall the legendary Mary Nelis, Sinn Féin councillor and mother of MacNiallais, dubbed by a unionist colleague ‘the republican movement’s answer to Winnie Mandela’.* Less diplomatic than her son, she had recently observed in a speech that the Apprentice Boys should know that those whom she represented had ‘never conceded your right to exist’. Mrs Nelis enjoys drama (she is notorious among journalists for the frequency with which, in front of television cameras during nationalist protests, she appears to faint under the feet of RUC men). She was holding forth to a small audience and a couple of television cameras about the evils of internment (which had ended in 1975) as a warm-up for the big anti-internment march due in Belfast on the Sunday. Behind her was a backing group of a dozen or so youths in black hoods facing the wall with their hands pressed up against the building, adding impact to her rhetoric about the wicked manner in which internees had been interrogated twenty-five years previously.

I waited until Nelis finished telling us of past injustices, tried and failed to catch the words of some doleful song about the wrongs of internment which was wailing over the tannoy and went into the Guildhall to meet the unionist mayor, Apprentice Boy and Orangeman, Richard Dallas. For participating in an Orange demonstration over Drumcree, Dallas had been stripped by nationalist councillors of everything that could be stripped from him and could not use the mayor’s room, so we sat in the council chamber until it was needed for a function and then in the tiny robing-room which we shared with a large vacuum cleaner.

After the meeting Paul and I walked what we could of the Derry walls and then went down into the Bogside. It was dominated by a vast new mural of a circle containing a faceless figure in bowler hat, black suit and Orange collarette with a diagonal red line across. Around the circle were written DERRY, GARVAGHY and LOWER ORMEAU. At the top was NO CONSENT. At the bottom, NO PARADE. (A few months later An Phoblacht/Republican News reported that at a discussion organized during the West Belfast Festival, a visitor from a Christian ecumenical group said ‘nationalists shouldn’t demonize Orangemen’, citing the ‘NO SECTARIAN MARCHES’ poster with the image of a faceless Orangeman. However, John Gormley of LOCC [Lower Ormeau Concerned Citizens], who first produced the poster, said, ‘We use that image because we don’t know what an Orangeman looks like given their refusal to meet with us and discuss the issue.’)

From the estate itself, we looked at the wall. It became clear that only a very few residents could see the walls from their houses and they would be able to see only the tops of tall people’s heads. So what the BRG had been complaining about was that at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning it would be theoretically possible for some residents to see a procession of bowler hats passing silently 100 yards away.

An engagement in Tyrone meant that we could not hang around to see the march in Derry city centre organized by the BRG to demand, according to the subsequent An Phoblacht/Republican News account, ‘equality for all the nationalists of Northern Ireland. At the rally, both Donncha MacNiallais and Martin McGuinness stressed the importance of continuing solidarity with nationalists in small villages throughout the Six Counties who each year had Orange marches forced upon them.’ A protest rally was planned for the following afternoon.

On Saturday morning we arrived in blazing sunshine, left our car near where dozens of coaches were off-loading Apprentice Boys and bands and walked across the bridge and into the city. Derry is a lovely city, much improved in recent years through investment by the British government, the European Union and the foreign-owned businesses courted by John Hume and others. Although in many respects it has blossomed under nationalist rule – it is, for instance, much more cosmopolitan than it used to be – many of those who love it with irrational passion are now wholly out of power. Derry Protestants love every stone in those walls; Derry republicans seem to hate it. Certainly they are still happy to vandalize it whenever there is an excuse. It is almost as if centuries of feeling excluded have made them loathe the very buildings. Tony Crowe, Apprentice Boy and historian, observed to me:

Derry was like a kept woman, a young prostitute, in an ironic way. When she was a young maiden she was loved and feted by the unionists and she was seen as the untaken bride and known as the Maiden City. And then when they inherited her eventually in the late 1960s, the nationalists couldn’t thole her because she still carried some of the vestiges of her early whoredom. Republicans systematically bombed and buggered the city and peaceful nationalists didn’t mind too much because they couldn’t relate to it. Now there’s no refurbishment of fine buildings like you have in the Republic in cities like Limerick: the old St Augustine’s rectory was knocked down and turned into a car park. It was within the walls, so nationalists felt it didn’t belong to them.

On our way to meet friends, Paul and I stopped to take a photograph of some graffiti in a loyalist area and were instantly challenged by a couple of thuggish-looking locals. Who were we? ‘Journalists,’ I said. ‘We don’t like journalists. You never write anything good about us. You’re all biased.’ ‘We’re not. We’re sympathetic,’ I said, having no desire to start the day with trouble. The yobs clearly thought this highly unlikely, but their aggression nonetheless lessened somewhat. ‘Just tell the truth,’ one of them said grumpily and off they went. You can always rely on loyalists to do their best to alienate, just as you can rely on their republican counterparts to woo the press politely and articulately.

We went on to the gloomy Victorian premises of the Northern Counties Club, where many Apprentice Boys were gathering for their dinner. It was 11.30 and their service at St Columb’s Cathedral was now over. The news was that in the middle of the previous night the RUC had agreed to allow thirteen Apprentice Boys to touch each of the gates in Derry’s walls as a symbolic re-enactment of their closing in 1690. At Butcher Gate, the RUC had asked one of the BRG stewards who was on duty all night if they could speak to MacNiallais. ‘When I found that no regalia at all was involved,’ MacNiallais explained to An Phoblacht/Republican News, ‘no bands or singing or shouting sectarian remarks, I told them we had no problem with this. Myself and a group of stewards escorted them to Butcher Gate, to Magazine Gate and towards Shipquay Gate. It was all very respectful on every side.’ For the Apprentice Boys, being patronized like that was very hard to bear.

We supped beer with Chris McGimpsey and several other of his brethren and left him to his big feed while we went to the Apprentice Boys’ Memorial Hall, paint-spattered and pock-marked from the paint bombs and ball-bearings that are launched at it regularly from the Bogside. In a tiny garden beside it is a statue of one of the Apprentice Boys’ heroes, Governor Walker. In the 1970s the tall pillar on which he stood was destroyed by a bomb; more recently another blew his hand off and damaged his face. Alistair Simpson spoke to the media and the crowd to announce that though they greatly regretted being prevented from walking the walls, they would not challenge the ban, but would walk the walls another day of their own choosing. Face was saved. The majority of the Apprentice Boys were relieved; the more militant were disappointed. Like most of the media they had been hoping for a fight.

After chatting with a few Apprentice Boys, we were led off by our friend Henry to the best watching-place, just by the walls at the top of the hill leading to the Fountain Estate, the loyalist ghetto, festooned with a mass of red, white and blue bunting and flags and the remnants of the mighty bonfire of the previous night. He wanted us to experience the sheer emotion that grips the Apprentice Boys as the walls come into view. The drawback was that instead of the usual wide variety of music, most of the bands inevitably broke into ‘Derry’s Walls’ as they approached their Mecca. Among the crowds a woman held up a poster saying ‘ULSTER PROTESTANTS DEMAND PARITY OF ESTEEM’, which showed that some PR lessons were being learned from the enemy.

It was a wonderful parade, full of vigour and brilliance of colour and sound, heightened in its impact when compared to its Belfast Orange counterpart because of the narrowness of some of the streets through which it passed. It’s a strange mixture of spectacle and intimacy and if you are on a narrow street it is easy to spot your friends as they stride past. Pointing at Mike or Graham or Chris or Jim, catching their eye and exchanging waves and smiles is one of the pleasures of parade-watching.

It was with some regret therefore that, in the early afternoon, duty called me to the Bogside to attend the three o’clock protest meeting. There was no IRA ceasefire at the time and there were fears of an organized assault on the RUC and the Apprentice Boys. Violence didn’t seem likely this time, since there wasn’t an awful lot for them to protest about, but one could never be sure.

My unionist friends just laughed when I suggested they might like to come with me, but Paul came along. We had to go by a longish indirect route because I had forgotten my press pass and so could not go through police lines. We got to the ‘Free Derry’ wall that is the Bogside equivalent of Speakers’ Corner just in time to hear MacNiallais uttering the word ‘Finally’, thanking the two or three hundred people present for their restraint and announcing the cancellation of the rally. The pretext was a generous gesture to the Apprentice Boys; the reality was that the turnout was so poor the protest would have presented badly. And then I caught the eye of Mitchel McLaughlin, the chairman of Sinn Féin.

A plausible and likeable fellow, McLaughlin is despised by the hard men because, unlike most other Sinn Féin leaders, he never served in the IRA; his nickname in Derry is ‘the draft-dodger’. He was wearing a smart grey suit and chatting to a young admirer, who told him, her eyes glowing with hero-worship, that he would have her vote. He is John Hume’s main challenger for his Westminster seat.

We had not met for a year, during which time I had frequently savaged IRA/Sinn Féin in print and had defended the Orangemen’s right to walk from Drumcree Church down Garvaghy Road, but McLaughlin, a complete professional, betrayed not a flicker of hostility. We shook hands: ‘Ruth, you are very welcome to Derry.’ Paul was similarly warmly greeted. Rather churlishly, the thought flickered through my mind that McLaughlin sounded as if he owned the bloody place. He then spent the next fifteen minutes or so explaining most courteously how I was completely wrong to have thought that Sinn Féin was behind the anti-parade agitation and expressing genuine amazement that I could have spoken up for the now ‘finished’ David Trimble, whom republicans were convinced had been politically destroyed by the fall-out from Drumcree.

He was called away to sort out some trouble, we nodded goodbye civilly, and Paul and I ambled up to Butcher Gate, where a small disappointed mob were looking for trouble. We returned to the parade just in time to see an alarmingly nasty-looking Ulster Freedom Fighters colour party, who should not have been part of the parade but who were ecstatically greeted by the inhabitants of the Fountain. There were other occasional jarring notes provided by militaristic bands.

The Apprentice Boys, being a mainly urban and working-class organization, attract some people who think the Orange is for wimps and the Black for old men. There have been problems with one or two clubs which are nothing more than fronts for paramilitaries and whose members turn up at parades in dark glasses and strut menacingly. (This was to be more evident the following year when two or three bands carried banners saying: ‘RE-ROUTE REPUBLICANS OUT OF NORTHERN IRELAND’.) Yet these represent a tiny fraction of the participants in a parade which is largely well-disciplined and brilliantly stewarded.

We headed for the Apprentice Boys’ HQ to look at some memorabilia, to find ourselves briefly caught, like the RUC, between drunken bottle-throwing loyalists and stone-throwing Bogsiders. A few minutes later, returning to the centre, we found tremendous RUC and media activity in a side-street. Cautiously peering around the armoured cars I saw the RUC extracting a dozen or so violent drunks from a pub while surrounded by perhaps twenty photographers and cameramen. At one stage a policeman almost fell over a TV camera. The yobs, of course, played up enthusiastically to their audience and obligingly created a small mini-riot with stones, glasses, bottles and anything else they could get their hands on. There was not an Apprentice Boy among them, for they had all marched over the bridge and were on their way to their coaches, but of course the violence was the scene that was shown on most news bulletins.

In 1997, the Apprentice Boys showed they were learning something about PR and began to speak of the parade as a pageant. There were lengthy discussions with politicians and residents and the nationalist SDLP mayor gave the Apprentice Boys his support. Reluctantly, MacNiallais agreed to allow the pageant’s participants on to the wall, so children dressed as King William and Queen Mary and assembled attendants walked along it in the morning. There was a difficulty about the flag outside the Apprentice Boys’ HQ: the union flag would be offensive. So the Apprentice Boys’ historian produced a green flag with a harp in the middle, which symbolized the unity of England and Ireland in 1689. The BRG did not identify it in time to object. They have since deemed it unacceptable.

Still, an accommodation had been worked out and there was no need to put a police line between the Bogsiders and the marchers. McNiallais and some colleagues came up to look at the parade and then some of their number began taunting the most militaristic-looking bands. A few bandsmen broke ranks and there was a scuffle.

I was at the same vantage point as the year before; exaggerated rumours were spreading about the level of trouble. That was a sufficient excuse for a couple of hundred drunks from the Fountain to start throwing stones and bottles and glasses at police: none of them was an Apprentice Boy. Television cameras were there again. Loyalists, as usual, were handing propaganda gifts to the enemy.

Having had the experience craved by all journalists of being hit by a stone that didn’t hurt but nevertheless gave one street-cred, I left that riot as it died down and with my English friend Mark proceeded to the Bogside. There was a crowd of children, mostly between six and sixteen, throwing stones at the police who were sealing off Butcher Gate and guarding the Apprentice Boys’ building. Standing in the middle of the kids, I could see how dehumanized are policemen in riot gear: they looked more like a row of Darth Vaders than human beings. But then you can’t withstand stones and petrol bombs in a woolly cardigan.

Out from the Bogside with MacNiallais came Gearóid Ó hEara, chairman of Northern Sinn Féin. He walked up to the middle of the crowd of children, put his arms around two of the littler ones and said: ‘Away now down to the Bog. You don’t want the international TV cameras to be seeing you behaving like Orangies.’* There was a diminution in the stone-throwing and some children drifted back through the gate. Then the television cameras went away. So did Ó hEara and MacNiallais. It was a dull, grey afternoon as well whiled away by stone-throwing as by anything else, so the children went back to work vigorously. A dog, who was clearly a seasoned rioter, rushed up and down between the children and the police barking, until he got hit by a stone and hobbled off whimpering. The children went on throwing stones: no grown-up came out of the Bogside to try to stop them.

MacNiallais was busy elsewhere, explaining to the media that nationalists had been assaulted during the parade and there would therefore now be no tolerance for the December Apprentice Boys’ parade; it would not now be allowed to go around the Diamond in the commercial centre of Derry.

Simpson had offered to halve the normal numbers in December but the BRG were not prepared to compromise. The day before the parade, which the police refused to ban, republicans went around shops and restaurants in Derry telling them to close: this form of intimidation is carried out by republican and loyalist thugs on special occasions and few businessmen are strong enough to withstand it.* So MacNiallais was able to complain that the parade had closed down the commercial life of Derry on a Saturday before Christmas to the inconvenience of everyone.

A well-orchestrated Bogsiders’ riot began behind the police lines that separated them from the Apprentice Boys. The complaint was that because Butcher Gate was closed off, they were being hemmed in; the alternative, longer, route to the city centre was unacceptable. The television showed Martin McGuinness and Mitchel McLaughlin being denied permission by the RUC to go through their lines. The riot followed shortly afterwards. There was a rare slip-up when a Sky camera took a shot of McGuinness smiling broadly at the stone-throwing Bogsiders. Later in the evening, a phalanx of youngsters arrived at the city centre from the Bogside wheeling shopping trolleys full of petrol bombs, of which about 1,000 were fired at police.

The allegation that this had been a spontaneous riot resulting from the disruption of the commercial life of the city at Christmas time did not convince on this occasion. The general conclusion was that the republican leadership had thought it useful to allow some of their hotheads to let off steam: the bill for the city was five million; the damage to the reputation of Derry abroad incalculable.

6. Glenageeragh, 15 June 1997

‘Like migratory birds, we return to the same scene every year,’ said Henry, as we headed towards his Orange Lodge’s annual service. ‘Whole families come together from elsewhere in the province or overseas. Like Christmas, it’s a time for family bonding. We tread well-trodden roads that our own blood have walked for many generations, be it to a country lane, to a rural church or through a little village or down a main thoroughfare into a town.’

Of all my Northern Irish friends, Catholic or Protestant, Henry has the greatest sense of place. A farmer who believes in working with rather than against nature, he has a view of the land that takes account of beauty as well as utility. Because he spends so much of his life in physical labour, his mind and his imagination have plenty of time to roam free and much of his intellectual energy is devoted to devising ways of making his people comprehensible to the modern world. A typical phone call from Henry will begin: ‘As I was graiping the silage this morning, I was thinking that another thing that makes my lot [i.e. his people] so cussed is …’ Or he might be in fatalistic mood: ‘Well, don’t worry about it: whatever we do, the rivers of destiny will find their own way into the sea of history.’

Henry had decided it was time I engaged with a past not focused on King Billy or the siege of Derry. ‘We’re going to where my family come from, where my blood flows, and to the burial ground of my people, Presbyterians all,’ he said, as we drove along the Clogher Valley. ‘Look at it. Picturesque, quiet, typical south Tyrone countryside, with its rolling hills and green grass.’

Of Scots planter stock on both sides, Henry’s lines can be traced back in Ulster to the late 1700s. He stopped to point upwards. ‘At the top of that hill, that’s where my great-grandmother McMaster was reared, looking on to the Clogher Valley. This water here goes into the Blackwater system which runs into Lough Neagh: the Blackwater is very fertile, warm ground. The bottom end of the Foyle is good ground too, which is why in Derry there are so many Presbyterian churches along its banks. As the seagull follows the plough, the Presbyterian follows the good land. Not that my people were gifted with the best of fertile land, but slowly we kept labouring on, always trying to improve ourselves.’

A few miles down the road he had shown me, with unconcealed emotion, the remains of a small building in a tiny overgrown patch of green, which once had been a thatched house. It was there that Henry’s paternal grandfather and at least seven siblings were born between 1880 and 1890. Two boys became farmers, one boy joined the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the girl married. And like so many Ulster Protestants before and after them, three of the boys emigrated, one to Canada and two to the United States.

In 1932, Henry’s grandfather had taken a huge risk. He had sold this 17-acre small farm to a Catholic neighbour and bought a 120-acre farm near Omagh, twenty miles north, which had been in the hands of a bank for five years. In 1923, it had been sold for £3,500, but farm values had been plummeting and the bank ended up repossessing it. ‘Grandfather gave £1,050 for it – huge money for him – and since an earlier owner had bought it from a landlord under a government purchase act, there was an annuity of £50 a year due on it too. The house was in rotten condition, with rushes six feet high, but grandfather was strong, gutsy and determined.’

Henry’s maternal grandfather took an equal risk. Descended from a family of small farmers who came from Ayrshire in the 1600s, he moved from Keady in County Armagh, intended by his father to buy a particular sensible property, ‘but he took a shine to a place no one else would take. His father was annoyed and wouldn’t give him any financial help. But he bought the place anyway, stayed there alone for years before he married, farming, making his own bread, washing his own clothes and hanging food off the rafters at night so the rats couldn’t get it.’

The Second World War put farmers on their feet, so both grandfathers prospered. The maternal grandfather wasn’t as physically strong as the paternal, but he had a gift for figures, so he branched out. ‘He always did his sums first before he attempted anything.’ On retirement at seventy he had a lot more land as well as other businesses. We saw the farms of Henry’s aunt and Henry’s cousin and the house his maternal grandfather was supposed in the first place to buy but had ‘taken umbrage against’. Henry knew every twist in the road. ‘This is home. Even if you had no blood connections to Clogher Valley, you’d feel attached to it: it’s homely. It’s always good to come back to it, irregardless of how far you go in the world. And the fact that it’s green, deep land and that most of your blood comes from it, I suppose is something that endears it to you as well.’

Then in front of us was Glenhoy church. ‘When Presbyterians were eventually given permission to build meeting houses, there wasn’t much good land left. When we got round to getting our own piece of land around here we drew the short straw. It’s damnable to dig graves here because it’s pure rock a foot down: they have to bring in compressors to bust it.

‘My paternal ancestors lie here. And they were all in my Orange Lodge, LOL 908. And there’s the new hall we built last year.’ He stopped at the top of a hill and pointed down. ‘If you stepped back to 1848 (the year the church was built) you would find my great-great-grandfather walking in procession on the same country lane I now walk in one of the glens of the Clogher Valley to our little kirk on the hill. It’s in the blood and calls from deep within us, our little ritual to let the outside world know we’re still here.’

We were late, too late for Henry to join the assembly a mile down the road and parade like his great-great-grandfather up to the church. But as we waited he talked more about the Clogher Valley and how even though his paternal grandfather had moved away from that area he would always come back to this lodge. One of Henry’s two brothers would be here today. His father would have been along too but he had to attend another Orange service elsewhere.

Henry’s forebears achieved high office in the Orange Order: his father, grandfathers and great-grandfather were variously Worshipful Masters of lodges and districts and even the county. Henry confined himself to being lodge treasurer for a few years, an office which he said was undemanding: he took the extreme modernizing step of opening a bank account, he collected the dues and kept the very simple books. Although he has an intense emotional attachment to his lodge, which he had joined as a junior, he has no interest in holding office again. This is a sign of the times that in some ways worries him: ‘A hundred years ago, high offices would have tended to be held by Church of Ireland clergy right up to bishops, as well as by the old gentry. Some of those lads had a lot of backbone as well as standing – and some of them were cranky and mad as hell.’

Henry told me the story of a County Grand Master of Tyrone. The improbably named Anketell Moutray was kidnapped by the IRA in 1922 with forty others and taken across the border to be used as bargaining counters for eleven IRA men from County Monaghan, who had been arrested in Northern Ireland. Moutray, who was eighty, drove his captors crazy by incessantly singing in a cracked voice penitential psalms and ‘God Save the King’.

Henry talked of how the gentry began to disappear: compulsory purchase legislation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had required many to sell their farms and two world wars had killed off many more. The leadership of the Orange became dominated by the business and professional classes, people like his grandparents. But in Henry’s generation, people like that are busier than in the past and less able to give their time and their effort to what are often the mundane details of lodge work. ‘It’s not that I work physically harder than my ancestors, but life has become more demanding. For instance, they didn’t have to spent their evenings bogged down in paperwork.’ And at higher levels within the loyal institutions, where there are endless meetings, these days people with small businesses are in danger of going to the wall.

There were very few people in the hamlet, just a few cars, a handful of wives and maybe ten or twelve children. It was a nice day and there was a silver band and it was pleasant to hear the strains of hymn music wafting up the hill and seeing in the distance the advancing procession of Orangemen, many of whom, when they finally arrived, had faces so weather-beaten that not even a townee like me could doubt their occupation.

There were only about fifty people present. The lodge has only forty brethren, of whom just over half were there and then there were guest Orangemen and other visitors. There was a pause for a chat with families, friends and acquaintances and then it was time to reassemble to walk in formation into the church. With the other non-processors, I followed them in and sat at the back of the little church in a right-hand pew along with women and children: across the aisle was the band.

The young Presbyterian minister wasn’t an Orangeman. Only about 12 per cent of them are, Henry told me afterwards, because, particularly in the rural parts, it was so much a family thing; this minister had no such connections. The service was the usual mixture of hymns and prayers but I was pretty rocked by the sermon, particularly since I knew the guest preacher to be a member of the Church of Ireland. One of the twentieth-century assumptions I have learned to jettison since I started consorting with evangelical Protestants is that Presbyterians are necessarily more extreme than Anglicans. Certainly the Church of England is notoriously woolly and the Church of Ireland in the Republic is self-consciously liberal, but the circumstances of life in Northern Ireland are such that Protestants of all denominations are tougher, more evangelical, less ecumenical and inevitably more political than their counterparts elsewhere. What was on the mind of the Reverend William Hoey (who was later identified to me as the minister who had called Cardinal Daly ‘a red-hatted weasel’)* was Drumcree, which, being only three weeks away, was on the minds of most people in Northern Ireland.

Reverend Hoey was certainly a lively and opinionated speaker, lukewarm only in his condemnation of loyalist paramilitaries who at the time were uttering various threats. In the Foreign-Officespeak that has been adopted and popularized by Sinn Féin and their counterparts in the Progressive Unionist Party, he said they weren’t ‘helpful’. He then reverted to Old-Testamentspeak and got stuck into the story of Nebuchadnezzar, who set up a golden image which all had to worship on pain of being cast into a fiery furnace; this appeared to be a metaphor for Drumcree. What bothered me slightly was that while Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego emerged from the furnace unscathed, as an unbeliever I wasn’t convinced that following the Reverend Hoey’s recommendation to trust in the Lord was going to be enough to extract the Orange Order unscathed from Drumcree. However, the preacher wasn’t worrying his congregation that much: at least four or five of the bandsmen had fallen asleep. Sunday afternoon following a large lunch is normally a time for hard-working countrymen to have a rest.

We sang our hymns and said our prayers and emerged into the sunshine. After some more chatting with ministers and friends, the men reassembled. A familiar face to which I couldn’t put a name smiled at me: I learned later he was a member of my Black Lodge. The silver band struck up a hymn and along with a few children I followed the Orangemen down the hill. We passed perhaps four houses on the way; the inhabitants were sitting in their gardens looking mildly interested. The only residents we upset were a collection of sheep who ran in panic to the opposite end of their field. After a mile or so the procession stopped, the Orangemen turned to face across the fields, the band struck up and we all sang the national anthem. Men resumed chatting for a while and then took off in their cars for home.

Henry and I walked back up the hill to where he had parked. ‘Forty years ago,’ he said, ‘this is what Drumcree was like. That’s what they don’t understand. We don’t need anybody to see us parading.’ ‘A woman rang up the David Dunseith phone-in programme on the BBC the other day,’ he added, ‘and said “The trouble over parade routes only comes when these so-called nationalists move into these areas”. It was unfortunately a very logical statement which would strike a chord with every Protestant in Portadown.

‘What have you got here? Four houses in a little over half a mile and only a few black cows and a few horny sheep to contend with. There are hundreds of parades like this. At Drumcree, the point of view of the Portadown man is: “My father and my grandfather walked through that way. Why should I change?” ‘ For inarticulate and threatened people, walking the territory is their way of expressing their link with the past.

When we got home, he showed me ‘Title Deeds’,* a poem that to Henry best describes the passion of the Scots-Irish dissenters for the land they have tilled for centuries, which is understood by so few outside their community, especially those who still see them as foreigners and usurpers. Its inspiration was Genesis 23:20: ‘And the field and the cave that is therein were made sure unto Abraham for a possession.’

Grey, twisted stones, half hid in careless grass,

Scribed with faint names of those who sleep below,

Who once saw winter into summer pass,

Felt dawn in Ulster, watched her sunset glow

O’er every hill they furrowed with the plough,

On the white walls of homestead and of byre

Loved beyond death, even as men love them now,

With a devotion burning like a fire.

Graves of the men of Ulster, who came forth

To seek a better country than their own,

As Abraham from Ur once quested north

Obedient to the faith which led him on.

Obedient down the wandering of the years

Through many a hope deferred, a plan delayed,

Claiming the land for ever by his tears Shed at

the grave where his dear dust was laid.

So by these graves we claim the country still,

This land made rich by sacrifice and tears,

Held with such passionate love, such stubborn will, Tom from the people oft down bitter years,

Spoiled by the hirelings of a servile court,

Harried by prelates of a faith denied.

The rebels’ plunder and the landlords’ sport,

Yet loved of those who tilled her fields, and died,

And dying passed into her kindly mould

To sanctify for us each kirkyard green,

Each sheltered vale and every hillside cold,

And little highways where their feet have been.

Thus do we claim our country from the lord

As Abraham claimed his at Machpelah’s cave,

From age to age still runs the changeless word,

‘The land is his who claims it by a grave.’

It came as no surprise that such an anti-Episcopalian poem had been written by a Presbyterian minister. What was more surprising was that he was a distant kinsman of Henry’s, for I had thought all of his blood were farmers or businessmen apart from the odd engineer. And Henry was able to tell me the story that had inspired such ardent love of Ulster and such bitter denunciation of his ancestors’ persecutors.

The paternal family of the poet, John Worthington Johnston, had farmed south of the border in County Monaghan from King William’s time until, in the 1860s, as a result of some skulduggery by the landlord and his steward, who wanted the prosperous farm for himself, they had to move. In the Clogher Valley, Johnston’s grandfather started afresh and turned unproductive land into a fertile farm; he had seven children, including one who became Henry’s great-grandmother. When Johnston died at fifty-one, his eldest son took over, ran the farm and then became a Presbyterian minister. He had a church in County Antrim and then for a long time served in Dublin. His son John, who was born south of Dublin, was only twelve when his father’s church, the Abbey, was burned down during the 1916 Easter Rising.

John Johnston graduated from Trinity College Dublin with first-class honours in Classics and from Cambridge University with a first in Theology and then, like his father before him, became a minister in County Antrim. In October 1942 he joined the 1st Battalion of the Royal Ulster Rifles, in the 6th Airborne Division, and served as one of the small number of ‘parachute padres’ until invalided out in 1945 after a parachute jump that went wrong. Of his three daughters, one became a distinguished historian and the other two senior civil servants, one of whom later became, like her father and grandfather, a Presbyterian minister.

The story of the Johnstons is an illustration of how, until very recently, almost the only acceptable way for any rural Presbyterian to follow an intellectual route was through the ministry. And equally graphically, his poem shows how even one of the loftier intellects among Presbyterian ministers kept true to his roots. Being elected by the members of their congregation, and running their kirk hand-in-hand with their elders, keep ministers humble and in touch with reality.

In his book on Presbyterians, the Reverend John Dunlop described the Bible as ‘the book of a pilgrim people’, which goes a long way towards explaining why they identify so much with the Israelites of the Old Testament, an aspect of their collective psyche represented throughout the rituals of the Orange and Black institutions. There was not a man walking in an Orange collarette down that hill from Glenageeragh, thinking about Drumcree, in whom Johnston’s poem would not have struck a deep chord.

7. Rossnowlagh, 5 July 1997

The annual Orange parade in Rossnowlagh, County Donegal, in the Republic of Ireland, challenges two beliefs: the first that Orange marches are inherently territorial and triumphalist; the other that a United Ireland would stamp out the Protestant identity.

The truth is more complicated. Northern Irish Orangemen love the Rossnowlagh parade because there is no trouble and nothing to prove: citizens of the Republic of Ireland – in so far as they are aware of the parade’s existence – are happy about it because they think it shows how tolerant they are. Yet the Orangemen of the Republic of Ireland are very aware that since the foundation of the Irish Free State, for a variety of reasons – including persecution by the IRA at a local level – Orangemen are down to just one parade a year at the seaside and away from any towns. And all Protestants, North and South, are aware that since partition, while the Catholic population of Northern Ireland has increased steadily, the Protestant population in the Republic has decreased from 10 to 3 per cent. Many believe that they were persecuted; some that they were ethnically cleansed.

Still, Rossnowlagh is every romantic Orangeman’s idea of a happy family day out. You have the countryside, you have the seaside and there are no protesting nationalists. The parade is policed by two or three amiable gardaí. Or, as one Orangeman put it to me: ‘You walk into Rossnowlagh and there’ll be one guard saying: “How’re ye doin’, boy?” ’

It is an outing, it is an adventure, for it involves foreign travel and it is a way of linking up again with those of your comrades, your brothers, who found themselves after partition on the wrong side of the border. Of all the parades I attended, it was the one most redolent of a school outing in an innocent world: no khaki, no guns, no nasty graffiti, not a hint of violence and therefore, of course, no television cameras. Yet, since Rossnowlagh happens the day before the Drumcree church parade, a lot of people present were fearful about what might happen the following morning. So was I, but being a stranger there, my more immediate concern was how to find the right place on time and where to park my car.

There had been consternation among some of the Northern Irish brethren when they discovered that I was going to Rossnowlagh on my own. Gordon was distressed because a business engagement meant he couldn’t drive me there. Roy was on my mobile worrying that because of a funeral he couldn’t take me, but he gave me details of how to find people there who would look after me and invited me to tea in his Orange Hall in Fermanagh on my way home. Brian was also frustrated at not being able to come; he contemplated but proved unable to bring forward the service he was taking at a different funeral.

How long to get there, I asked Graham, whose favourite parade it is but who this year was doing duty elsewhere looking after the young at a Bible study camp. ‘Well, of course it’s fine while you’re in Northern Ireland,’ he explained, ‘because the roads are very good, but once you get over the border they’re absolutely dreadful, so you’ll have to allow about two hours.’ ‘You lot are always going on about the Republic’s bad roads like a kind of defence mechanism,’ I said. ‘It’s not confined to that,’ he said. ‘Every time I spend a few days in the Republic of Ireland I know more than ever I don’t want to be part of a United Ireland.’ He paused. ‘But then maybe when you’re abroad, you always see the worst of it the longer you’re there.’ ‘Why doesn’t that apply to home?’ I asked, and he replied, Oh, that’s different. That’s like saying that your house needs a bit of renovation.’

I left my Orange friends in Portadown, noting as I looked back that there was an Ulster flag flying from a flagpole above my bedroom window. As I drove along the excellent roads fretting about Drumcree I got depressed once again about how deceptively tranquil is the countryside and how awful the sufferings of many of its inhabitants. You come out of Armagh into the Clogher Valley and thence to Fermanagh of the lakes and everywhere is lovely and well-tended and apparently peaceful; the fields are neat and the cattle sleek and the adolescent lambs are gambolling, yet road signs throw up reminders of atrocity after atrocity and latterly, reflecting my new preoccupations, of lower-level inter-communal cruelties and sectarian strife and the burning of Orange halls and the vandalizing of Catholic churches and the boycotting of decent shopkeepers from both tribes.

Then I knew I was in Donegal, for the roads had, in truth, suddenly become very bad. Seeing from a sign that my destination was, however, only 8 kilometres away, I thought Graham had been making rather a fuss, but then I got caught behind a bus with a shamrock on the back which crawled all the way to Rossnowlagh; it turned out to be a shuttle-bus for transporting fragile Orangepeople around the place.

Rossnowlagh farmers are happy annually to make a few bob out of this incursion from the North so there was no shortage of paying car parks. It was a sunny day, I wandered back to the assembly point and watched out for the people I was supposed to be linking up with, but inevitably I’d forgotten half the relevant details, like the number of their lodge, and was confined to wandering about the place asking people if they knew a big man with a moustache who came from Cavan. But then another coach drew up at the assembly point and out of it emerged the friendly face of the Grand Master, Bobby Saulters.

Bobby Saulters is sunny-natured, humorous and fatalistic, which in his difficult position is just as well. He is also without self-importance. As he stood there clutching his bowler hat and beaming at people, he was ribbed about something he had said on television that had annoyed the Orange hard-line pressure group known as the Spirit of Drumcree. ‘Ach,’ said Bobby, laughing, ‘you should have heard what was on my answering machine when I got home.’

Like all Orangemen of my acquaintance, Saulters cannot see you without worrying that you might be hungry. Having established that, unlike the brethren in the coaches, I had not stopped for refreshment along the way, he said we must go to the meeting hall for tea. We wandered up and joined a queue of Orangemen and their families: there was no VIP line, no notion in anyone’s mind, let alone his, that the Grand Master deserved any special attention other than a warm welcome for having come all the way from Belfast.

By now a veteran of church and Orange and village halls and refreshment tents in fields, I marvelled with Saulters that we were given proper crockery. Here catering was not left just to the ladies: a clergyman was in charge of selling sandwiches and a layman in charge of the teapots. The whole event was very much a community effort by local Protestants. I had a sandwich and refused cake, but Saulters was so worried that I might faint from hunger on the parade that eventually he persuaded me to parcel up a cake in a napkin and put it in my bag for later. I ate it in the afternoon sitting on the grass during the service.

There seemed to be far more women than usual in the Rossnowlagh parade. I studied their clothes for a while. There was a wide variation in the dress code probably reflecting differences between rural and urban and middle-class and working-class backgrounds. One lodge had everyone dressed identically, regardless of what suited their colouring or size, in another everyone wore a suit and hat of the same colour but in different styles, another permitted skirts of any colour but all jackets were black and there was one in which they wore their best outfits, which were all different.

I ambled along with the parade in company with Gerry, an Irish journalist (I think we were the only media representatives there). We enjoyed the sunshine and the walk and the music and talking politics and people. When we reached the little seaside town, it proved to be unpretentious and unspoiled. There were the usual stalls selling fast food, books and souvenirs. Most people settled down by the sea or in the field and ate their own picnics.

The hotel was full up, crammed with feeding dignitaries or Orangepeople who had pre-booked – the usual number swollen by the presence of some members of the Imperial Grand Council – but my companion and I got into the bar because we were journalists. The manager depressed us by telling us that for the first time ever, they had no guests staying this year because of the parade. They had never had any problems at Rossnowlagh; there never had been any tension and it had always been seen as a day for both communities. But Drumcree Two had changed the climate and people were frightened.

Having looked at the more interesting stalls we settled down in the field waiting for the usual problems of whistling microphones and missing speakers to be resolved by the hosts. I recorded some of the speeches. Most memorable was the thoughtful address by Dr Warren Porter, Presbyterian clergyman and an Assistant Grand Master of the Orange. It was no accident that he chose as the text on which to preach these verses from 1 Peter 2:

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.

Having your conversation honest amongst the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation.

Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme;

Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well.

For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men:

As free, and not using your liberty for a cloak of maliciousness, but as the servants of God.

Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king.

Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward.

For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully.

For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God.

The message could not have been plainer, and it was echoed by other platform speakers who implicitly or explicitly urged restraint. Here are a few extracts from speeches which – apart from coded messages about Drumcree – are typical of how Orangemen greet each other from platforms.

Right Worshipful County Grand Master, Most Worshipful Imperial Grand Master, Most Worshipful Brother Saulters, County and District Officers, brethren, sisters, ladies and gentlemen, it’s my pleasure and privilege to have the distinct honour indeed to be here today at such an excellent gathering. As I look out across this wonderful crowd, the colourful display, the respect, the dignity and the discipline that we’ve just shown, it typifies what many Orange gatherings are about and that they do no harm to anybody whatsoever … I would like bring to the members of Donegal County Grand Orange Lodge fraternal greetings from the County Fermanagh Grand Orange Lodge. It is a pleasure indeed and a privilege to represent County Fermanagh here this afternoon and I look forward to welcoming those of you who can come next Saturday to County Fermanagh to our demonstration there.

Orangemen know what they’re about. They show that responsibility, that dignity, that restraint and that discipline. That’s what we are about. That’s what we project to the world. That’s what I trust, ladies and gentlemen, we always will be about.

It’s been my pleasure to be here and I thank Donegal for the warmth of welcome, for their hospitality and for the real dignity that they have shown this afternoon. Thank you very much.

He was answered by an aged Orangeman.

Thanks, Brother Foster, for your kind words. In regard of the County of Donegal I could be possibly one of the oldest Orangemen here today. I have been connected with the County Donegal Grand Lodge for over sixty years, and I have been attending the Twelfth of July parades for somewhere around seventy-five years. And I want people to see the way the Orangemen here and our brothers of Northern Ireland are and we never had no friction whatsoever. We came and went home peacefully and quietly and there was no act of discredit to our collarettes.

Then Antrim:

Most Worshipful Grand Master, Imperial Grand Master, Worshipful County Grand Master, brethren, sisters and friends.* Being the last speaker I feel that I want to on this first occasion associate myself sincerely with all that the previous speakers have said. I came down with the North Antrim District Lodge and we had a wonderful trip down. This has been my first time down into the demonstration here and I would like to take this opportunity today on behalf of County Antrim Grand Orange Lodge to bring the good wishes of our County to the brethren of County Donegal here and all the brethren in the Republic of Ireland. We do appreciate what you have done for the good of our institution and we do wish and pray them God’s help as they work for the extension of God’s Kingdom here. Thank you very much indeed.

Finally there were the ‘few words of thanks’ on behalf of the County Grand Master, officers and members of County Donegal Grand Orange Lodge to all the brethren of the Grand Lodge of Ireland, county officers, district officers, sisters, today ‘for this grand and glorious day that we’re having here in Rossnowlagh’. There were thanks too to the ‘Reverend Brother’ who had conducted the service, to the giver of the ‘inspiring address’, to all the visiting lodges and bands who had attended, to County Grand Lodge for leading the parade, to the brethren of the district and the lodges for all their support and ‘heartfelt thanks to the Grand Master for visiting us, thanks to the ladies of Rossnowlagh, thanks to the owner of the land … we hope with God’s help that we’ll all be here next year … and may God bless you all and have a safe journey home and may we have a pleasant weekend’.*

Gerry and I walked back to the car park ahead of the parade. He had to file a report and I was rushing back to Northern Ireland to get the low-down on the latest negotiations over Drumcree.

8. Lurgan, 26 October 1997

It was Reformation Sunday. I had been held up in Belfast and had to drive at illegal speeds to get to Lurgan before the parade set off. I am vague about distances, but I realized I was getting close when soldiers, police and Land Rovers began to appear.

As I reached Lurgan and parked the car at the end of the main street, I could see a ceremony was in full swing. Denis Watson, the County Armagh Grand Master, and officials of the Lurgan male and female lodges were laying wreaths at the war memorial. Watching respectfully were twenty or thirty men in suits, a couple of dozen women in big Sunday hats and maybe twenty girls. All were wearing Orange collarettes.

Standing slightly to the side were the preacher for the day, the Reverend Brian Kennaway, and Graham Montgomery, who was holding, upside-down, a pile of six bowler hats, for those performing the remembrance ceremony needed to be bareheaded. Typically, despite the solemnity, I got an immediate smile and nod from Brian and Graham and the other three or four Orangemen I knew.

Only a couple of dozen locals watched this small parade walking to the annual Reformation Sunday service at Brownlow House, the headquarters of the Royal Black Institution, who share the Victorian Gothic building with their landlord, Lurgan Orange District. It was being rebuilt, having been damaged the previous year by petrol bombs on the day before the Apprentice Boys’ march in Derry. Many of the treasures of the Royal Black Institution were destroyed or damaged; it is costing about £8 million of public money (from the fund for compensation for terrorist damage) to repair and refurbish the house. The band, the Craigavon True Blues, seemed incongruous: they were a typical ‘blood-and-thunder’ band, containing young men one would rather avoid in a dark alley who wore bright blue uniforms and played the hymns like a call to battle. It is hard to avoid mixed feelings about these bands: on the one hand the macho, aggressive aura is off-putting; on the other, they’re wonderful to walk along with. That is why the republican bands that have emerged in the past decade or so are mirror-images of them.

So I walked along the pavement keeping pace with the band for the mile or so to Brownlow House. Here and there, a few residents came out of their houses and watched with the air of people pleased to have some diversion on a dull Sunday afternoon. We walked up the drive, someone opened the door and the members of the Orange Order went upstairs. The drummers wiped the perspiration from their faces and, along with the rest of the band, turned and went home.

Slightly ill-at-ease, although I had been invited, I followed the worshippers up the stairs and went to the back of the room. Many knew I’m from a Catholic background, and some of them even knew I’m an atheist, and I was nervous that my presence might therefore be offensive to some of them. But I was overlooking the determined hospitality of the rural Orangeman.* Denis Watson summoned me to the front bench, where I sat between Graham and a man I had met before, who gave me a big grin and said with heavy irony: ‘That was a very offensive parade, wasn’t it?’ It wasn’t the moment to tell him that you wouldn’t have to be neurotic or republican to find the Craigavon True Blues a bit much. The Worshipful Master of the lodge then removed my anxieties by making a kind reference to me in his opening remarks. I realized then that Orangemen are as unselfconscious about welcoming you to their worship as to their houses.

Brian Kennaway is a Presbyterian minister whose religious belief he describes as being ‘expressed in the simplicity of the Gospel recovered at the Reformation of the sixteenth century. That simple biblical religious belief affirms that salvation can only be achieved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, revealed to us in the scriptures alone.’ For someone from the Roman Catholic tradition, the Calvinist dismissal of good works as an aid to salvation is always disconcerting, but Kennaway makes it clear that if you have faith, ‘good works will follow as evidence’. He quotes William Fenner: ‘Good works are a good sign of faith but a rotten basis for faith.’

I’d sung more hymns in the last couple of years than I had in the rest of my life and I’d become pretty expert at ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ and ‘Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus’, but I didn’t know three of the robust hymns that Kennaway had chosen. However, a large Orangeman was valiantly playing the tunes on a tiny electronic keyboard and I sang along as best I could.

Kennaway took as his biblical text 2 Chronicles 34, where King Josiah deals with false gods by having their altars broken down and their carved and molten images broken in pieces. As he read to us of the burning of the bones of the idolatrous priests upon their altars, Graham grinned at me broadly. (At the end of the service I went up to Kennaway and asked genially: ‘Brian, when you go off to lynch the priests, can I come too?’ He looked at me in horror and said, ‘Surely you didn’t think I meant …’ and then laughed when he realized I was pulling his leg.)

It was a very instructive service for me, for Kennaway is evangelical and radical as well as very intelligent. Of all the services I’ve been to, it was from this that I learned most about what religious Orangemen truly believe and why the Reformation is so immediate to them. It was an exemplary service, too, in its clarity and homely informality.

Kennaway was determined to show his audience of old and young, and many shades of Protestantism, why they owed gratitude to God for giving men like Calvin, Knox, Luther, Wyclif and Zwingli and their successors ‘all the gifts of understanding so that they translated your word into the common language of the people of the day … We thank you that your work is not static or stagnant: it is a living word.’

He gave thanks that ‘the word lives by your spirit in the hearts and lives of men and women and boys and girls,’ and wished that it would ‘really live in the hearts and lives of our people throughout this island.’

His sermon was about the relevance of his Old Testament text to the sixteenth-century Reformation.

We are here today to give thanks to God for the Protestant Reformation. And we make no apology for doing precisely that. Because we have everything to give thanks to God for in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. We do so today, because this is the nearest Sunday to the last day of the month, because it was on the 31st of October 1517 that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door at Wurtemberg … There was nothing particularly dramatic in this nailing theses or statements or propositions to the church door. There were no newspapers. Indeed if you go to any university today you’ll see noticeboards and all sorts of announcements and notices nailed to those noticeboards. That was a simple way that Martin Luther had of drawing attention to issues which concerned him.

Not all the theses were worth reading, he pointed out, and read out some that were, several of which were about the ‘the over-enthusiastic sale of indulgences or letters of pardon from the pope’. There was some more about what was owed to Luther’s successors and then he came to the heart of his homily:

It seems to me that we’re very good at drawing parallels in our local situation in Ulster to other situations in the world, but we’re not so good when it comes to drawing parallels to our spiritual situation in Ulster with spiritual situations in the scriptures. And for that reason I wanted to draw the parallel today because the problem of Ancient Judea is exactly the same as the problem of Ulster. It’s spiritual. Brethren and sisters, you had better believe it.

The answer therefore to the problems of Ulster is not a new political initiative. The answer to the problems of Ulster is a spiritual initiative, because the problems are fundamentally and basically spiritual problems. May I quote words spoken a few weeks ago by the County Grand Chaplain, William Bingham, when he addressed a fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference:

‘As I look around Britain today, I look at the situation not only as an Orangeman, and an Ulsterman, but as a Christian – indeed a Christian minister. I am committed to Orangeism, but I am supremely committed to Christ. I recognize that my approach to religion – indeed many people’s approach to religion in Northern Ireland – is out of tune with the times in England but I do feel passionately that Christ and the gospel has provided the answer to the deepest needs of society and that peace and reconciliation begin at the Cross.’

The parallel with ancient Israel, Kennaway went on, was that

every time she went wrong spiritually, she went wrong politically. Every time she went after other gods, she lost her political battles … We are in danger of becoming a race merely of political Protestants … if we get away from the centrality of the word of God …

I believe in the principles of the loyal Orange institution, but I wonder do we all believe in these principles? … We have to make sure that our principles and our practice run parallel … I cannot help but fear that will ultimately be our downfall. We will become political Protestants and we will abandon our biblical principles. You see as I often say to groups of Orangemen and I make no apology for saying it again and saying it here: ‘If you are involved in something or you’re doing something which you know in your heart of hearts is out of keeping with the principles of scripture, then do, I beg you, not only for your soul’s sake – and that’s far more important than anything else – but for the sake of the institution which you profess to love, change your ways or resign.’

Oh, we have great principles, we have noble principles, but our condemnation will be when the world points the finger at us and asks where is our practice? Our principles and our practice ought to be the same. Do we want to see change? Do we really want God to bless us? Do we really want God to intervene in a situation in Ulster where if we are honest with ourselves we know it is only God’s intervention that can save us … People like to draw parallels to our present crises to the turn of the century – the Home Rule crisis – but some things are different, you know. And you’d better believe it. You see God played a more significant part in our nation at the beginning of the century. People were fundamentally more religious. And when they sang the words of that hymn we sang – ‘O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come’, they actually meant it. Do we? What’s the answer?

The answer is reformation and revival under the anointing of the spirit of God.

After we had sung the final hymn – a setting of the 46th psalm about God our trusty shield who makes wars cease – and, of course, the national anthem, and most people had left, Kennaway anxiously questioned those of us remaining about whether he had got his message through. Had he been direct enough? Always, my biggest culture shock when I go to the Ulster Protestant heartlands from London or Dublin, is once again to realize to what extent they say what they mean and mean what they say. It is no wonder they have such difficulty with the English desire to fudge and the southern Irish desire to please everyone.

A few of us stayed on for a chat and they showed me some more of the damaged Brownlow House. I asked about the band and was told that it was regarded as a major breach of Orange etiquette that its members had not come to the service. They shouldn’t, said one of them, be hired if they weren’t prepared to participate in the religious part of the proceedings. There was criticism, too, of the martial way in which they had banged out the hymn tunes. But one of the Orangemen shrugged. ‘What can you do? There are only two local bands and they’re both blood-and-thunder, because that’s what the young men like, and there’ll be bad feeling if we don’t hire locals.’ ‘If necessary,’ said Brian Kennaway, who is notorious for not suffering gladly either fools or yobs, ‘we could dispense with a band and parade down the road whistling.’

So once again, another own goal by decent Protestants and another example of the how perception and reality are at odds where the Orange Order is concerned. Here was a service attended by believing Christians, who listened intently to the message that they should live their lives as witnesses to God. Most of these people are the salt of the earth. But because they hire the local band, an outsider observing their parade could well have gone away with an image of drum-beating bigots.

A Cancellation, 9 August 1997

I was over from London for the Apprentice Boys’ parade which was to take place the next day, when just before midnight came the news that the Newtownbutler Residents’ Association was determined to block a small Black parade through the town early the following morning. So Mark and I decided to go there before we went to Derry.

The situation in Newtownbutler was particularly sad. Despite tragedies like Enniskillen and all the border murders, Fermanagh Protestants are notoriously less bigoted than those of any other Northern Ireland county. Newtownbutler had a cross-community historical society and a Thursday Club for the elderly and prided itself on its harmoniousness. As one resident put it in the summer of 1996: ‘When there was a death both communities attended the wake house and the funeral.’ And a local SDLP politician told a journalist that cooperation was the norm: ‘It’s the so-called sick-cow syndrome. It doesn’t matter if it is a Protestant or a Catholic cow. I remember once there was a cow in distress and the owner was away. A neighbour called to borrow something on the farm and saw the cow and called in others and by the time the calf was born, the DUP, the UUP, Sinn Féin and the SDLP had been there to help. That cooperation is there yet, but it is most definitely under threat.’

It was Drumcree Two and the subsequent boycotting of Protestant businesses that had made the difference. Within two months of Drumcree, Catholics and Protestants were boycotting alike and sectarian tensions had provided fertile ground for the establishment of a Newtownbutler Area Residents’ Association to try to block parades.

By August 1997 Newtownbutler was radicalized and no Catholic residents were prepared or able to challenge the Residents’ Association, which was able to swell its ranks when necessary by bringing in reinforcements from outside. What caused particular offence to Protestants were the protesters from the nearby town of Clones, in County Monaghan in the Irish Republic.

Mark and I arrived around 7 a.m. in Newtownbutler to find a group of disconsolate young men. Some of them had just arrived, a few were still arriving and others had been up all night fearful that the police would seal off the main street. Some of them seemed drunk. Not long before they had been told that the Blackmen had cancelled their parade. A smashed window was testimony to their frustration.

We walked up to the top of the village and then back to the bottom because I was shivering and Mark had a sweater in the car. A few RUC men arrived and took up their position at the top of the main street, well away from the protesters. They were in good humour because, as they confirmed, the parade had been cancelled. They would not have to face insults, stones, petrol bombs and maybe worse.

We wandered back to the protesters and found that some of them were still deeply reluctant to believe this had happened. It might be a cunning ploy. It might be that if the protesters left, the Blackmen would arrive and stage their parade after all. I couldn’t help. These were cross young men. It was not a gathering where one could explain that the Royal Black Institution didn’t approve of telling lies.

Protesters stood around grumbling for a while and then matters were enlivened by the arrival of a red-headed American woman in army boots who engaged the residents’ leader in conversation for the next fifteen minutes or so. Mark and I stood by fascinated, for here in the flesh was the living embodiment of the Noraid* stereotype – the American who was more republican than the republicans, whose crassness and bigotry made even Sinn Féin twitch.

She lived in Derry, it emerged, and had done so for two years. She had come to Newtownbutler with a carload of protest banners and was staying in a local guest-house. Amid great laughter at her own intrepidness, she explained how on the phone she had had to ask the guest-house owner if it was a nationalist household to be sure she’d be with ‘our people’. She talked a lot about ‘our people’. She spoke of Derry and of how Gerry O’Hara (Gearóid Ó hEárá) was ‘an angel’, who had obligingly arranged for her to be registered for voting purposes at his brother’s house.

She spoke with shining eyes of the protest movement. ‘Soon they won’t be able to march anywhere,’ she said triumphantly. ‘They should all be sent off to Scotland in a boat.’ (In this at least she showed herself slightly more moderate than one of the inhabitants of Derry who recently wrote on a wall across the road from the Apprentice Boys’ headquarters: ‘NO MORE LONDON/DERRY/START SWIMMING’.

Gerry McHugh, the local residents’ leader, was uneasy with her. He was well enough trained to know that you watch your words except in private; republicans never admit in public that they want to get rid of Protestants, and indeed many of them would never be anything like that extreme. As she ran out of steam, Mark asked her disingenuously if she’d now be going back to Derry for the Apprentice Boys’ parade. ‘Certainly not,’ she snapped. ‘I’m off to Donegal to speak Irish with my friends. Most of my friends speak Irish.’

Mark and I withdrew, leaving her to carry on encouraging Irish Catholics to hate and persecute Irish Protestants.

Some Anthropological Notes from the War-zone, 8 August 1998

The following night was to be the first time drumbeats continued to reverberate in my head long after I arrived back in London. But then I had had a double and severe dose of the war-drums. Not only had I stood on Saturday for more than two hours at the flashpoint in Derry where bands demonstrated what they thought of their old enemies from the Bogside, but I had walked along the Falls Road the next day beside republican bands vigorously putting up an aural two fingers at their Protestant neighbours in the nearby Shankill Road. The banners, the uniforms and most of the tunes were different; the motives and the methods identical.

Chris Patten, chairman of a commission on policing, watched the Apprentice Boys’ parade from the safety of a window high above the Diamond, the commercial centre of Derry, thus missing the frisson shared by those of us down below who were dodging the missiles occasionally being exchanged between loyalist and republican oiks over the heads of the police who protected them from each other.

That morning, a few Bogside residents had violated the deal struck with the parade organizers and had jeered and spat when wreaths were being laid at the war memorial in the Diamond. The Apprentice Boys’ leaders, who had been making heroic efforts to make their parade acceptable to nationalists, had urged calm and good behaviour, but as each club and accompanying band arrived at the Cenotaph, you could feel a palpable sense of grievance about the earlier insults to their dead. Bands had been instructed to stop the music as they passed the memorial, but they were provoked by republican cat-calls from behind the police Land Rovers and more seriously by accusatory bellows from a couple of dozen loyalist drunks about ‘big girls’ and ‘Lundys’ if they stopped playing. (Lundy is burned in effigy by the Apprentice Boys annually for having proposed surrender during the Siege of Derry.)

The temperature increased when, in response to a waving of the Irish flag, a yob climbed a lamppost and waved a Union Flag at his enemies. Sporadically, the stones came flying over from the republicans and were picked up and returned by their loyalist counterparts. ‘I’m very impressed at their range,’ observed an American visitor to me as we ran. ‘If they were in the United States they’d be champion baseball players.’

The majority of bands virtuously obeyed orders, though many of them relieved their feelings by breaking into loud martial music as soon as they had passed the memorial. The unvirtuous lost their tempers at the memorial itself and played to their hooligan gallery with deafening renditions of songs guaranteed to provoke the most reasonable of nationalists. It was the drummers who provided the most fascinating tribal spectacle, for some of them conducted war-dances on the spot, jumping around in circles and bumping and grinding as they banged their drums and went red and sweaty with effort and rage. The ecstatic response from some female bystanders indicated this was the loyalist equivalent of the Chippendales.

Both lots of would-be rioters shared a deep frustration because cross-community agreement over the parade had removed the excuse for serious trouble. Like hooligans everywhere, they were dying for a rumble. And assiduously they pressed the buttons they knew would wind up the other side. ‘Fenian bastards’ and ‘Provo scum’ calls were balanced by ‘Fuckin’ Orangies’ and subtleties like ‘Billy Wright, bang bang’ – an allusion to the killing in the Maze prison of hard-line loyalists’ favourite murderer. Leaping up behind the police lines, they made throat-cutting gestures at each other, whistled their preferred national anthem and waved their colours. Yet balking them at every turn was their mutual enemy, the ever-present and highly efficient RUC. So as they were blocked by riot police from climbing over the barriers into each other’s territory, both sides screamed ‘SS RUC’, a chant first developed by republicans.

Driving away from Derry with my friend Henry, he said: ‘Tomorrow I’ll show you the bull-pens.’ Obediently, I waited until Sunday morning to be enlightened. At the local cattlemart I surveyed the rows of heavy steel pens. ‘You get two bulls together and they don’t know anything except that they have to fight,’ said Henry. ‘And they’ll break through cement walls to get at each other. All you can do is stop them seeing each other. That’s what should have happened yesterday.’

‘That’s all very well, Henry,’ I said, ‘but there would have been an outcry from the Bogsiders about the police hemming them in and there would have been violence with the loyalists. And all this with Chris Patten looking down at the police from above.’

‘What drives me mad about politicians – and I’ve no reason to think Patten’s an exception,’ said Henry, as we squelched back from the pens, ‘is that they won’t face reality. Now what you had yesterday were two lots of young fellas with hundreds of years of breeding telling them to fight each other. It’ll take another hundred years to breed out that tribalism. We have to face what we’re dealing with. And what we’re dealing with are bad bastards who are egged on by worse bastards who nurture what nature’s already given us. If people behave like animals, they have to be treated like animals.’

I thought of Henry throughout the afternoon in Belfast as I watched little children marching along with the Republican parade commemorating the twenty-seventh anniversity of internment alongside fife-and-drum bands – some wearing camouflage gear – which were blaring out the tunes of famous songs about brutal Brits and heroic Irish and martyred dead. Four or five youngsters sat on the edge of the platform in the lorry outside Belfast City Hall and cheered and clapped a collection of speeches from angry revolutionaries, who included an implacable ETA spokeswoman. When they had finished applauding Gerry Adams’s vitriolic attacks on the RUC and the British occupying forces and the unionists, they cheered again when he sent them away with instructions to agitate until the republican wish-list had been fully granted. All the kids grasped that Sunday afternoon was that their tribe was good, the other one was bad. And every time they saw policemen or Land Rovers – there to keep them safe from loyalists – they shouted ‘SS RUC’. Whatever the politicians say, while we need the bull-pens, we’re a long way from peace.

* This is as good a place as any to clear up a problem of language that is a running sore today in Northern Ireland. Catholics are those who believe their Church has evolved from the ancient Christian Church; Anglicans, many other Protestant sects and Orthodox Eastern Churches come into this category, along with those who acknowledge the Pope as head of the Church, and who have historically therefore been termed ‘Roman Catholics’. ‘We stand,’ says the Orange Order, ‘for the true Catholic Faith and we deny any church the right to make exclusive claims thereto. The title “Catholic” belongs to all who own the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour and honour Him as Lord. They are all by His grace members of His Catholic or Universal Church. That saving grace is confined to no single sect.’

Yet since Rome has always insisted it had exclusive use of the term ‘Catholic’ and since the belief that it is the one, true Catholic Church has been a principle of Roman Catholic teaching in Ireland, it is in the psyche of the Irish Roman Catholic that he is a Catholic, and that anyone calling him a Roman Catholic is in some obscure way being offensive. A Southern Irish friend of mine recalled hearing the term first in the 1960s in television coverage of an Ian Paisley speech; he and his other teenage friends gazed at each other indignantly. ‘What does he mean Roman Catholic?’ said one of them. ‘We’re not Italians.’

Orangemen are asked not to take offence but, in the interest of saving trees, throughout this book I use ‘Catholic’ to mean ‘Roman Catholic’.

* Irish for ‘vision poem’. The Irish Catholic Utopia was a country from which all the Protestants would have been evicted.

† Protestants call Catholic churches chapels.

* An Orangeman asked me to point out that such merchandise has nothing to do with the Orange Order.

† I was wrong. Paisley did not join the Independents when he fell out with the Orange Order. He is, however, an Apprentice Boy.

* Known locally as a heart-attack on a plate, this is normal rural fare and can include bacon, eggs, sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms, fried bread and potato bread, and is usually accompanied by home-made soda bread, one of the most delicious foodstuffs in the world.

† Ireland has few black residents and Ulster hardly any, so locals are unaware of any ambiguity when they refer to the Blackmen. One July I was standing at a reception desk in a Belfast hotel when an American woman asked if there would be any more marches that summer. ‘Oh yes,’ said the receptionist, ‘the Blackmen parade on the last Saturday in August.’ She continued finalizing the guest’s account and thus missed her astounded and bewildered expression. I thought of setting the tourist right, but decided it was more fun not to.

* I am told that some local Orangemen who are members of the DUP were annoyed at this remark. I am sorry to have hurt their feelings, but I record what I hear.

† I was corrected about this later. It would have been true six or seven years ago: indeed, in 1991 the wife of a Sinn Féin worker brought her children, her sunglasses and a chair with her and watched the parade. In the last few years, however, because of the increase in sectarian tension, Catholics stay away. There would, however, be many stalls and shops manned by Catholics servicing the paraders and onlookers.

* Orangemen describe them as ‘blood-and-thunder’ bands, Catholics (because they dislike them) and loyalist youths (because they love them) call them ‘kick-the-pope’.

† I should have added, ‘or in the Gaelic Athletic Association, which provides a social and sometimes political focus to their lives’.

* I remember particularly the Murley renditions of ‘It’s A Long Way to Tipperary’, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ and ‘All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor’.

* A clarifier here. My occasional references to ‘my’ lodge merely denote a friendly relationship and are not intended to suggest that a male-only all-Protestant lodge has taken leave of its senses and admitted as a member a female atheist who was baptized Catholic. I have standing invitations to certain functions there, I’ve eaten there three times and I feel a special gratitude to the brethren for being so kind and welcoming to a nervous outsider.

* Technically, in 1984, the city became ‘Derry’ while the county remained ‘Londonderry’. In practice, Catholics tend to call both Derry and Protestants both Londonderry. Those trying to avoid giving offence call the city Derry/Londonderry and humorists call it Stroke City.

* Republicans irritate unionists by comparing themselves with the ANC.

* Another insulting term for Protestants is ‘Jaffas’. Abusive terms for Catholics include ‘Fenians’ and ‘Taigs’.

* The playwright Hugh Leonard elucidated this approach in a comment on the funeral in January 1998 of Billy Wright, the notorious loyalist terrorist: ‘The town of Portadown was closed down yesterday for the obsequies of Billy Wright. Shopkeepers were “asked” to suspend business. “Your co-operation is noted (my italics) and appreciated,” is how the request was worded. Take away the olde-worlde politeness, and the translation goes: “Shut up shop or we’ll blow your effin’ heads off.” The morality is, of course, that the more people you murder, the bigger your funeral.’

Even when operating ceasefires, loyalist and republican paramilitaries have traditionally kept control of their ghettos by kneecapping or beating half to death with iron bars or baseball bats studded with nails the disobedient or those classified as ‘anti-social’; shopkeepers are brought to heel by vandalizing or setting fire to their property.

* In 1996, after Drumcree Two, the subtle, learned and sophisticated Cardinal Daly – like most of the population of Ireland – went nakedly tribal. In an emotional and often bitter television interview he declared himself betrayed and shocked by the decision to let the Orangemen down the Garvaghy Road and thereby reinforced the prejudices of all those loyalists who doggedly believe that Catholic clergy are, at best, closet republicans and, at worst, tribal witchdoctors.

* My brother pointed out that the poem was based on Longfellow’s ‘The Jewish Cemetery at Newport’, which laments the fate of the Jews at Christian hands.

* Orangemen report frequent confusion on the titles front. My favourite example was the Australian who got so muddled about whether to call a visiting dignitary ‘Most’, ‘Right’ or ‘Very’ Worshipful, that he lost his grasp completely and addressed him as ‘Most Adorable Brother’.

* I mentioned to a Orangeman on one occasion that I had left in the middle of a set of speeches because they were awful and I couldn’t bear any more. He laughed. ‘My favourite moment at these events,’ he said, ‘is when after a particularly excruciating performance, the seconder gets up and says: “I would like to second the motion so ably proposed by Brother X.” ‘

* I once went to a Portadown Black ‘Last Saturday’ where my companion and I were taken to eat in the Orange Hall and therefore became honoured guests, even though James was from the British Foreign Office – an institution which as a consequence of the Anglo-Irish Agreement is believed by most unionists to be intent on selling them out. After the meal, we stood with some friends in the field waiting for the speakers on the platform to get going. We were spotted by an officer who felt we had to be given some mark of respect. Two chairs were brought down from the platform, placed in front of the crowd and we were summoned. ‘No, no, please, I’m fine,’ said James, who is of a retiring disposition. More experienced in the ways of Orangemen, I sat down without protest and eventually he too was persuaded to sit. Within a minute he had spotted an elderly woman and had given her his seat. Down from the platform came the officer, carrying another chair; this time James accepted his fate. For the whole of the service, except when on our feet for hymns and the national anthem, the three of us sat there, apart from those on the platform the only people among the thousands present not standing or lying on the grass.

* NORAID (the Irish Northern Aid Committee) has since 1969 raised money in the United States ostensibly for the families of republican prisoners. In effect, it has freed up IRA money which could then be used to buy weapons. Its members are happy to encourage people 3,000 miles away to kill and be killed. Its organ, The Irish People, is a hymn to hate.

2
What Members of the Irish Loyal Institutions Do

The Orangeman is a man of truth,

Who scorns all fraud and art;

And rear’d in truth, from his early youth,

He has shrin’d it in his heart;

For it proves to him a mighty shield

Against every foeman’s dart;

And his life he’d yield, on the blood-stain’d field,

Ere with that bright gem he’d part.

The Orangeman is a man of might,

But trusts not in fleshly arm;

He dares to fight for freedom and right,

And he knows no vain alarm.

But strong in truth, in virtue bold,

He fears no earthly harm;

For his heart’s stronghold, like his sires of old,

Is in virtue’s potent charm.

The Orangeman is a man of thought,

He dwells upon glories past;

Upon battles fought and great deeds wrought,

Where blew war’s deadliest blast;

And remembers mercies heaven bestowed,

When affection’s waves roll’d fast;

When man’s wrath o’erflowed, on life’s rough road

Were thorns and brambles cast.

The Orangeman is a man of faith,

He believes what is written – all,

And reveres till death what the Scripture saith,

No matter what does befall.

He hears, as it were, from heaven’s high throne,

His uprisen Master call;

And he takes his cross, and enduring loss,

Bursts through the world’s dead thrall.

The Orangeman is a man of prayer,

To heaven looks for aid;

Against want and care and every snare,

For his soul’s dread ruin laid.

And a prayerful man is never known

In perils to be afraid;

For God’s power is shown when he alone

Can save from the foeman’s blade.

The Orangeman is a man of peace,

But purity peace precedes;

And when ills increase, he cannot cease

To be warlike in his deeds.

Thus does he become a man of strife,

Of strife in a holy cause;

And when danger is rife, he would risk his life

For the King, and Church, and laws.

The Orangeman is a man of love,

He prays for his enemies,

And he’d seek to move the great King above,

On his humble bended-knees.

He loves his Bible, he loves his King,

And all good men he sees;

He loves the Orange, nor hates the Green,

And he bows to the law’s decrees.

E. Harper, ‘The Orangeman’

Why they join

SAM: It’s part of us. My father and my grandfather were in the local lodge. As a little boy, the Twelfth of July was a big day. I had bands singing in my ears. It was something that was just part of your culture. It was almost like Christmas when you were a kid. You thought it would never come back again. So it was part of you. There was a band attached to my lodge so I joined the band and was a member of that band for forty-two years. There were two sets of fathers and sons in that band.

BRIAN: I resisted it for a long time after I became a Christian in 1954. I saw conflict between principle and practice. But having thought about it and realized I believed in what the institution stood for, I saw a parallel between the church and the Orange Order. The church is imperfect; the institution is imperfect. So I realized I should be inside.

Even in the days when I was critical of the Orange Order from outside it, when I saw an Orange parade, I saw a particular man I knew well, and I knew that I could not apply any of my criticism of the Order to him. I chose his lodge. So you see, the ways people live their lives speak louder than anything else. This is why I feel strongly that as an institution we don’t need a professional PR person; we simply need Orangemen on the ground, faithful people with integrity, for that speaks volumes.

CHRIS: There’s an element of father to son, but there would be a lot of people in our lodge whose parents would never have been involved; people who just feel a need to identify themselves. As a kid I always wanted to be an Orangeman, because of what was happening with the bands. I loved the bands. My father was first in the family to be a member of the Orange Order. He joined much to the chagrin of the entire family, who thought it was a lot of crap. There was a sort of a left-wing fundamentalist Protestant element in my family. Grandfather was a Cooneyite; they didn’t even believe in churches. They’re almost like Quakers.

WILLIAM: I joined because some of the folk who were a little older than me that I respected a lot were in the Orange and they were folk who were Christians to begin with. They were folk who were working within the community, part of community life, and I thought, well, they’re older, they’re mature and they believe it’s important and has something to give.

I did it undoubtedly primarily for the sake of history and identity with the Protestant people throughout the generations. My forefathers were in it, my grandfather was in it, certainly I was going to keep the lifeline so to speak. And I stayed with it through thick and thin because I believe that when you look through its qualifications and its principles, if men can live by it, it gives them a good foundation of life and it holds on to principles that society is losing at this stage, like the importance of family life and respect for elders.

If you sit in a lodge meeting and the eighty-nine-year-old speaks, everybody’s quiet and gives him respect and listens. And that isn’t happening generally in society. They tend to separate the young, the middle-aged and the old – even the churches tend to separate them. I think that’s very important.

JOYCE: I was away for a long time and when I came home, because I was now living in a middle-class area, I took this way of reconnecting with the working-class district where I was brought up. An Orange Lodge gave me the chance to show my loyalty to my country and my religion and to be involved socially with my own people.

MICHAEL: I was a bit of a thug when I joined. It was just after the murder of the Scottish soldiers, and I walked round Sheffield with a Rangers scarf tied round me head, a leather jacket and lots of Red Hand badges on the front ready to attack anyone who sounded like a Fenian.

All I’d got culturally was that I was a Prod and we were under attack and we were all supporting each other. So I joined the Orange Order without much of an intellectual agenda. But because I came under the influence of the prayers and the Bible at lodge meetings it reminded me of what I had had as a younger boy. It gave a context for our actions. So I abandoned the physical force idea and started to think more constructively. And the Order did that for me. It did that for a lot of people. It was a restraint on people. This is the Bible. This is your faith. It reminds you that you can’t act in a manner that is inconsistent with the basic principles. You actually think about that.

ALF: I just had an interest in the Orange Order. I thought it was a good institution. There was a lot of brotherly friendship. And you met people in different places and if you were an Orangeman, you were welcome. And I just had a liking to join the Orange Order, because there’s no doubt about it, lived up to, it’s a good institution. There’s no getting away from that.

To Alf, who was ninety when I met him and who had been a member of his lodge for seventy-two years, his involvement with the Orange Order was a matter of the greatest pride. Early in our conversation he pulled out a copy of its Laws and Ordinances and read to me, his voice trembling with emotion:

Basis of the institution: The institution is composed of Protestants, united and resolved to the utmost of their power to support and defend the rightful Sovereign, the Protestant religion, the Laws of the Realm, and the Succession to the Throne in the House of Windsor, BEING PROTESTANT and united further for the defence of their own Persons and Properties, and the maintenance of the Public Peace. It is exclusively an Association of those who are attached to the religion of the Reformation, and will not admit into its brotherhood persons whom an intolerant spirit leads to persecute, injure or upbraid any man on account of his religious opinions. They associate also in honour of KING WILLIAM III, Prince of Orange, whose name they bear, as supporters of his glorious memory.

Alf is one of many Orangemen who cannot see how anyone could find such a statement objectionable; the principle of religious tolerance is for them an imperative. Over and over again people like him spoke to me of the importance of respect for those of different religious persuasions. They talk a lot of ‘decent’ Roman Catholics, by which they mean those who want to live at peace and will not be taking potshots at Protestants from behind hedges, throwing stones at their parades or voting for those who want to drive them off what they would describe as ‘the Queen’s highway’, or force them into a United Ireland.

How they join

The etiquette is that you are asked, though obviously you can intimate to an Orangeman that you would like to join his lodge. Your name will be proposed and seconded and there will be a vote: maybe about 10 per cent of people are excluded at that stage. Then, in theory at least, you are vetted: ‘There’s supposed to be a committee in each lodge which should actually check the qualifications and the type of character of a candidate,’ said Martin Smyth, retired Grand Master. ‘I was reading the minutes of my lodge about three years ago and I discovered that when I was proposed, a member of the lodge said: “There’s no need to have a censoring committee on this candidate.” And another brother got up and said this candidate should be treated like everyone else and proposed a censoring committee. That brother was my father. It reflects the type of man he was and perhaps reflects me too. Because I believe that things should be done decently and in order and show no favouritism. And whoever it is be treated equally.’

The 1997 recruitment leaflet puts it succinctly: ‘If you are a practising Protestant in the truly religious sense; regularly at your place of worship, morally upright in your life, and if you display a tolerant spirit towards those with whom you may disagree, then you will be welcome within the Orange instititution.’ Tolerance goes only so far, though. So frightened is the Irish Orange Order still of the wiles of the Church of Rome that it is afraid of converts. There is an unspoken fear that they might be Romish (or, worse, Fenian) Trojan horses. It is therefore difficult, though not impossible, for them to join.

Anyone wishing to join the Orange Order will be told of ‘The Qualifications of an Orangeman’, to which he is expected to live up. ‘The qualifications show what the commission is – what’s expected of people,’ said another Orangeman. ‘And people fall short of what’s expected. They fall short of what’s expected from their respective churches too, but it doesn’t mean to say the whole church is entirely wrong because of that. And the same applies to the Orange institution.’ He was another veteran, and he was as proud as Alf of the principles and language of ‘The Qualifications’ which are crucial to an understanding of the fundamental principles of Orangeism. Recently they were published with an illuminating commentary from the Chaplains’ Committee of the Grand Orange Lodge for study in lodges. I have included here in italics and in brackets a section from the commentary on each part of ‘The Qualifications’. Although rather long and indigestible for those unused to reading scripture, it is worth making the effort to read the whole passage.

An Orangeman should have a sincere love and veneration for his Heavenly Father (To fear God is to treat Him with reverence and respect … The Orangeman ‘should never take the Name of God in vain’* because to do so is to despise His Most Holy Majesty … God is Sovereign and God is Saviour … We recognize God’s Royal Rule and we rest on God’s redeeming work): an humble and steadfast faith in Jesus Christ (As Orangemen we stand by the Gospel. ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved’ … Payments and Penances are not required. Christ has paid all His people’s debt … But doctrine implies duty. Brethren, let it be our care to exercise the faith we proclaim and to prove our profession by the deeds of a godly life)., the Saviour of mankind, believing in Him as the only Mediator between God and man’. (The one all-perfect Mediator excludes all others. No one else, not even his own blessed mother, can fulfil the work which He reserves to Himself) He should cultivate truth and justice, brotherly kindness and charity, devotion and piety, concord and unity, and obedience to the laws; his deportment should be gentle and compassionate, kind and courteous (Loving God, we are to love our neighbour also … The virtues of truth, justice, kindness and charity are only visible when we put them into practice), he should seek the society of the virtuous, and avoid that of the evil (We are of course but sinners saved, and we will seek the welfare of every fellow-sinner. But to share their vice would shame us and harden them. From such we turn away); he should honour and diligently study the Holy Scriptures, and make them the rule of his faith and practice (The Bible is our only infallible rule of faith and practice. To them we bow and place no mere tradition of men beside them. They are our guidelines for godly living. Their daily study is the secret of our strength.), he should love, uphold, and defend the Protestant religion, and sincerely desire and endeavour to propagate its doctrines and precepts (A ‘Protestant’ is one who ‘protests for’ the Evangelical Doctrine. Such was the meaning given to the word by the first Reformers. The common faith they taught is the religion we are pledged to uphold and defend. An Orangeman stands for the great truths re-discovered at the Glorious Reformation. That ‘Christ alone’ is our only sacrifice, that it is through ‘Grace alone’ that we can experience salvation, that justification can be received through ‘Faith alone’, and that the ‘Bible’ alone, is our only rule); he should strenuously oppose the fatal errors and doctrines of the Church of Rome, and scrupulously avoid countenancing (by his presence or otherwise) any act or ceremony of Popish Worship; he should, by all lawful means, resist the ascendancy of that Church, its encroachments and the extension of its power, ever abstaining from all uncharitable words, actions, or sentiment towards Roman Catholics (Our Order and the Word of God prescribe a double duty to us. We are to speak the truth, and we are to speak it in love … Truth demands that we expose and refute the peculiar errors of the Church of Rome. Love requires that we do this in a manner which honours our Saviour. Above all we proclaim that Redemption is complete. No priestly ritual can add to the work of Christ … We refuse all communion with the errors of Rome nor can we share in her forms of worship. And we do all this for love of truth, and love of souls); he should remember to keep holy the Sabbath day, and attend the public worship of God, and diligently train up his offspring, and all under his control, in the fear of God, and in the Protestant faith (While every day is His by right He has appointed one day in seven for His special service … The Sabbath should be our delight. Not gloom but gladness should mark its tone … our children should know that it is a glad thing to go to the house of God); he should never take the name of God in vain, but abstain from all cursing and profane language, and use every opportunity of discouraging those, and all other sinful practices, in others; his conduct should be guided by wisdom and prudence, and marked by honesty, temperance, and sobriety; the glory of God and the welfare of man [should be the motives of his actions] (An Orangeman is to bear witness to the truth among his neighbours day by day. We claim to reverence God. How can we blaspheme His name? … As those who will answer to Him from whom nothing is hidden we must show by our speech and convince by our characters that we are sincere servants of the Most High), the honour of his Sovereign, and the good of his country, should be the motives of his actions. (Every Orangeman is called to be a loyal citizen of the country which gives him shelter* As a good citizen he will be obedient to the laws of the land, his higher obligations to God never being forgotten. All evil conspiracy and rebellion are forbidden by our faith. If tyranny indeed may be resisted, as our history attests, no private individual has any right to break the law for his own advantage … Law-abiding loyalty to Queen and Contitution will be the hall-mark of all our public work as citizens and in good times and bad the Orangeman will be steady. This is our duty to our country. It is also our duty to God.)

Orangemen admit that some lodges are neglectful on the vetting front and that unsavoury people get in. But the democratic nature of the organization is such that nothing can be done about this. There is no way as things stand to stop a lodge with a weak or pliable Worshipful Master being taken over by undesirables, who in turn recruit more undesirables. Jim Guiney, murdered in January 1998, was a paramilitary commander as well as the Worshipful Master of his lodge.

In normal circumstances, there are checks and balances. First, the vetting – which at the very least is supposed to ensure that anyone joining is ‘good, decent, law-abiding, of good character and attends church’. Then there is the election procedure, which allows for black-balling. Then sponsors are appointed to prepare the candidate for his initiation, which involves learning by rote some simple responses to questions and is intended to impress upon candidates the seriousness of what they are about to become involved in.

‘I was very surprised at how religiously-based it was,’ observed one newcomer. That is a common response, for where the Orange Order is concerned, fiction is almost always stranger than fact. ‘And it’s much more pedestrian than candidates expect,’ said an old hand. ‘That’s part of its charm.’

How they are initiated

On the 12th of July in the year ‘89,

I first took the notion this Order to join;

Then up to the Lodge Room and there I did go,

And what I got there you will very soon know.

CHORUS: On the goat, on the goat, To get in the Order you ride on the goat.

And when I arrived there I knocked on the door;

There’s one they call Master who stood on the floor;

Come in and sit down you are welcome sez he,

But a goat in the corner kept lookin’ at me.

CHORUS

Then the goat was brought forward, that I might get on,

After I mounted they bid him begone;

Through the Lodge window the goat he did go, Through bogs and wild mountains and where I don’t know.

CHORUS

Then after a long and wearisome chase,

The goat he arrived in the very same place,

Approaching the Lodge Room I heard them all sing

Success to the member that made the house ring.

‘The Ride on the Goat’

As Orangemen frequently and plaintively point out, the organization is not a secret society but a society with secrets, and very few of them at that. How can an organization be secret, they ask, when its members parade openly in groups with banners declaring where they are from and what they stand for. ‘The only secrets the Orange has are related to its ritual,’ said an Orangeman. ‘There has to be something mysterious to make you want to join and find out. That’s what creates the male bonding. The fact that we know what the ladder stands for on our sash may not be earth-shattering, but it matters to us.’ His father is in the same lodge; his mother refers to what they do in the lodge as ‘playing silly buggers’. They don’t take offence. ‘Sure, it’s childish. That’s why we don’t want to do these things in public. It’s not because they’re bad, but because they’re stupid.’

I know from private and public sources the details of Orange ceremonies and rituals.* At their worst they are no more stupid than most ceremonials or rituals of guilds or fraternal societies seem to outsiders; they are certainly not sinister. Ritual accounts for less than 1 per cent of what goes on at an Orange Lodge – infinitesimal compared to what goes on among Freemasons. The most exciting event is an initiation, and mischievous brethren enjoy winding-up potential candidates by making mysterious references to ‘riding the goat’ (which is, in fact, a backwards acronym for ‘the ark of God’†) and hinting darkly at stringent tests of courage. There are physical aspects to the initiation (the travel) which involve a blindfolded candidate having to face certain tests and travails inspired by a biblical story; in tough urban areas, especially in England and Scotland, these might be occasionally on the exuberant side, but in general the experience is rather tame. ‘The initiation is a bit amusing,’ one young man remarked, ‘but when you come home you think it’s a bit silly.’ A less blasé brother describes the ceremony as ‘a heady mixture of folk memory, rural Ulster Protestant tradition and ancient ritual’, which is for many ‘a moving experience, a rite of passage from boy to manhood, the admission to an historic brotherhood bonded by centuries of blood, fire and persecution and a spiritual experience couched in terms of the language of the deliverance and pilgrimage of the children of Israel’.*

The written-down part of the initiation involves the sponsors leading the candidate into the Lodge Room, where the Worshipful Master reads out in full the qualifications of an Orangeman and establishes that the candidate assents to these and is seeking admission to the Orange institution of his own free will. The lodge members agree to his initiation, the chaplain says a prayer and the Worshipful Master then asks the candidate at considerable length if, inter alia, he promises allegiance to the sovereign, her successors and the constitution; assistance to the civil authorities when called upon; fidelity to brother Orangemen ‘in all just actions’; and a vow of silence about lodge proceedings to any but a brother Orangeman. There are the promises about religion and secret societies.

‘I don’t think there’s anything in there that would be offensive towards your Roman Catholic friends,’ said a senior Orangeman who was telling me about the ceremony. He then went on to read out one request of the Worshipful Master:

Do you promise, before this Lodge, to give no countenance, by your presence or otherwise, to the unscriptural, superstitious, and idolatrous worship of the Church of Rome? And do you also promise never to marry a Roman Catholic, never to stand sponsor for a child when receiving baptism from a priest of Rome, or allow a Roman Catholic to stand sponsor for your child at baptism? And do you further promise to resist, by all lawful means, the ascendancy, extension, and encroachments of that Church; at the same time being careful always to abstain from all unkind words and actions towards its members, yea, even prayerfully and diligently, as opportunity occurs, to use your best efforts to deliver them from error and false doctrine, and lead them to the truth of the Holy Word, which is able to make them wise unto salvation?

All that Orangemen can see or hear when they read such words are the injunctions to behave properly towards Roman Catholics. They are genuinely baffled that outsiders find such rules and language bigoted.* Perhaps the reason I have never taken offence is that I was brought up in the Republic of Ireland under the authoritarian and intolerant Irish Catholic Church and understand something of their traditional fears. Also, by the time I began to read the rules and regulations I had developed a great admiration and affection for many Orangemen.

‘As far as the Orange Order’s concerned,’ said an aged Worshipful Master to me, ‘it’s not a bigoted order. It’s a religious order, there to protect the religious beliefs of the Protestant people. In the very opening prayer you pray for your Roman Catholic brethren. I don’t dictate to the Roman Catholic man where he should go to church; I’m as happy with him going to his own as he is to mine. I’ll not condemn any man’s religion – except Paisley, for he’s divided everybody.

‘To me the Orange is a family and if a man would live to the qualifications of the Orangeman and to what he’s taught inside the four walls of an Orange hall, he would be fit to live a good life.’

Where lodge meetings are held

All over Ulster in villages and in the middle of nowhere there are little Orange Halls built of wood or brick, often with galvanized tin roofs. In Dromore, for instance, Orangemen used to meet in an old army hut that was a rapidly decaying tin shack on wooden stilts. Ulster Protestants are frugal people and the prospect of raising enough money to buy a site and erect a hall was daunting. Alf, the Worshipful Master, decided on drastic action. ‘I said this night, at a lodge meeting: “We must have a hall of our own. I’ll supply the material and I’ll pay the contractor and I’ll get paid some time.” The secretary came in the next morning and he said to me – the only time he ever give me any praise – he says: “Churchill the Second.”’

It took some time to find and buy the right site, and then they built a hall with a stage, which seated about three hundred so it could be used for socials and dances as well as band-practice. It was opened in 1953 in September; in December the north wall of the church collapsed and the church service was held in the hall for three years. Socials ended about twenty years ago; nowadays the hall is a venue for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme. In the fullness of time, the brethren repaid Alf; building that hall is an achievement which even forty years later he felt was a highlight of his life.

Most halls have been built mostly through jumble sales and sales of work and other unremitting labour by the ladies. Most would be smaller than Alf’s, though large enough to host the dances and conversazioni and teas that made Orange Halls important community centres until the advent of television and other major distractions. The furnishings are of the plainest: mostly wooden benches and trestle tables and the most spartan of spartan fixtures and fittings. There will always be a picture of the Queen and usually some representation of King Billy, and the lodge banner will be displayed on festive occasions.

In towns, the buildings are larger, since they often have to accommodate district or county functions, but austerity remains the norm. Brownlow House, the headquarters of the Royal Black Institution (Orange and Black men often share accommodation), was a fine house until it was torched, though it too was plainly furnished. The two-storey hall at Scarva is as luxurious as it gets, with the stained-glass window featuring King Billy, a spacious assembly-room and portraits and prints of Orange significance.

A 1960s building, the tall, narrow Orange HQ at 65 Dublin Road, Belfast, sets the tone for the whole organization. There are a few adornments, including a portrait of the Reverend Martin Smyth, ??, Grand Master for a quarter of a century, and some William-related pictures. A small room contains an interesting hotch-potch of archives, books and memorabilia, but for the most part the building consists of spartan offices.*

What happens at lodge meetings

Although the ritual and ceremonies in every Irish lodge are the same, the ambience and emphasis and what happens afterwards depend on where and who you are. I once sat in on a conversation between two Orangemen, one from Belfast and one from rural Tyrone, each of whom was amazed by the other’s revelations about his lodge. The Belfast Orangeman reckoned that although all his brethren were believing Protestants, 90 per cent of his lodge hadn’t been to church in years except for Orange services; he would expect churchgoers to join one of the lodges for committed, evangelical born-again Christians. His lodge was almost entirely social – more a drinking-club than anything else – although it kept to the strict rule that alcohol should not be consumed until after the formal meeting is over. Brethren paid about £60 a year in basic dues to cover rates and so on and a levy for Orange widows; any shortfall was made up by a night at the races or a big booze-up.

The brethren of the rural Orangeman’s lodge were Calvinist or Free Presbyterians and 90 per cent would go to church every Sunday. Like most Orange lodges, his was strictly teetotal. The dues were £12 a year and the difference had to be made up by jumble sales; even raffle tickets were not allowed.

For geographical reasons, rural lodges are more likely than urban to be socially mixed. These days very few of the gentry or the better-off would attend lodge meetings, though one of the exceptions is Eldon Lodge in Belfast: ‘It’s the toffs’ lodge,’ said my urban friend, ‘for the great and the good; the one Stormont Cabinet ministers traditionally would have been members of. Today it has people like Josias Cunningham [Ulster Unionist Party president] or John Taylor [UUP deputy leader], who never goes but needs to have a sash available if required.

‘While we shelter under the trees in the rain on the Twelfth with ham sandwiches and warm Guinness, they bring a caravan and drink champagne and eat canapés. One year they had shrubs outside. They only walk to the field. Never walk back. And they all wear bowler hats with an orange lily on the side of it. I don’t know how they’d survive in an ordinary lodge.’*

There are several business and professional lodges like that in Belfast. One was nicknamed the ‘Cripple Lodge’, because they couldn’t walk – being important chaps, most of them were speaking around the country on the Twelfth. Over the years there have been lodges for special interest groups from bakers to shipworkers to soldiers, but deindustrialization has reduced their numbers dramatically. In Belfast, many lodges would have a broadly working-class catchment area. But in most rural areas, lodges have almost always been cross-class, which is one of the reasons for keeping the dues low. James Molyneaux, ex-leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, joined his local lodge in Crumlin, County Antrim, in the late 1930s.

‘It was a watershed year for our little lodge when Colonel Pakenham, who was landed gentry and a member of the Senate, transferred from the toffs’ lodge in Belfast to ours and became Deputy Master. My father was the WM and we were bottom of the social tier as farmers. And I used to think it very odd that this great man who had been through all these battles and all that – and had been in command in Palestine – sat there deferring to the WM and ensuring that everyone else did the same. And as DM he would have gently reproved anyone who spoke out of turn without addressing the chair.

‘They decided to build a new hall and Pakenham offered to go on the organizing fundraising committee: he would bring aristocracy to events – people like Craigavon and the Marchioness of Charlemont on a couple of occasions. We were rubbing shoulders with all that. So you had the top drawer and the bottom drawer.

‘There were ten or twelve workers on the Pakenham estate. And if one was first committee man or something, the colonel would have turned around and said, ‘Brother Dalton, could I ask through the chair what’s your view on this particular matter?’ He wasn’t talking down: he was giving him his place.’

There are far fewer toffs these days, but in many little lodges throughout Northern Ireland there are still farmworkers sitting with prosperous farmers along with shop assistants, bakers, road-sweepers, clergymen and the local solicitor, doctor and teacher. I have also come across several accountants and financial advisers. This may be because in that line of work they particularly need a bit of mystery in their lives, or it may be because, as educated men, like the clergymen, they take a disproportionate number of the senior officerships.

For the routine part of the meeting, the Orange Order has rules and regulations to which officers and foot-soldiers must conform. But first, a run-down of the elected officers’ roles, as spelled out at their installing ceremonies. Private lodges are at the bottom of the Orange hierarchy; next come district lodges; then county grand lodges and at the top is the Grand Lodge.

The WORSHIPFUL MASTER is enjoined ‘to exert your authority to maintain sobriety and good conduct, to use your best endeavours to promote harmony, good fellowship, and social virtues among [the lodge’s] members, to observe strictly the laws and customs of the Institution, and to obey the orders of Superior Lodge authorities’. He is given a mallet ‘as the outward and visible sign of authority to rule this Lodge; this Holy Bible which contains the precepts whereby all men, particularly Orangemen, should govern and regulate their conduct and actions through life; this book of the Laws and Ordinances, whereby you are to govern and guide this Lodge; and lastly, this warrant, which is your authority from the Grand Lodge of Ireland, under which your meetings must be held’.

The DEPUTY MASTER is required to assist the Worshipful Master and to stand in for him when required. Both he and the Worshipful Master have to confirm that they have not been given their positions ‘for any private emoluments or advantage to yourself’.

The SECRETARY is required ‘to attend to the correspondence and other business of the Lodge, keep a faithful record of its proceedings, and make the necessary returns to the next Superior Lodge’. He must ‘keep regular, and preserve, the papers, books, seals, and other property of the Lodge entrusted to your care, having them at all times ready to produce or hand over to the proper or legal authorities, and that you will prepare and make all returns required by the Laws of the Institution or other proper authority’.

The TREASURER is required ‘to collect diligently all payments to be made, and accurately account for all monies which shall come into your hands on account of, or for the use of, the Lodge, and to submit an annual financial statement duly audited by those apointed by the Lodge’.

The CHAPLAIN (preferably a clergyman) promises ‘to discharge the duties of this office with due solemnity and decorum’. He is given ‘this most precious Holy Bible – the very Word of the great I AM – on which the principles of the Order are surely founded, and for the purity of which many saints died at the stake. Also this Ritual, which contains the prayers and a list of those portions of Holy Writ to be read at our meetings for edification and guidance of all.’ His attention is drawn to specific portions of scripture and prayers to be read at the initiation, ‘so that candidates entering our ancient and illustrious Order may know that they are being received into a Brotherhood whose profession of Faith, Hope and Love is well and surely founded’.

The LECTURERS instruct ‘candidates for initiation into our Loyal Institution and confer upon them the two Orders [Degrees] laid down by the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland’.

The CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEE, ‘a brother of experience and sound judgment’, whose brethren ‘repose great confidence in him’, is the convenor. ‘Always act in your Lodge, or Committee, so as to merit the confidence reposed in you by the members’, which includes when required performing the duties of master and ‘in all cases which shall come before you in Committee to act with fidelity and impartiality, without favour, affection, or personal ill-will to any person.’

The OTHER MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE are required to show ‘sound judgment and strict impartiality between brother and brother … to discharge the duties of Master’ when required, and in cases coming before the committee ‘to act with fidelity and impartiality, without fear, affection, or personal dislike to any man’.

The TYLER guards the inside door ‘while the Lodge is sitting; to receive and announce members and visiting brethren; to see that none enter or pass without permission from the chair; and that all wear the colours to which they are entitled’. The ‘honour of the Institution should be your aim, and the safety of the portal of the Lodge room your ever constant care’. It is to the tyler that the password* has to be given. ‘We have a pompous idiot of a tyler in my lodge,’ observed one Orangeman. ‘He’s known me for twenty years, but when I turned up having forgotten the password, he wouldn’t let me in. I had to wait for someone else to arrive who told me what it was so I could solemnly tell it to the tyler.’

The first four officers are given a badge (a special collarette) and a sign of office (e.g. gavel, pen) and ushered to a special chair; the chaplain has a special chair too and is given a collar of office; the lecturers are given regalia; the chairman of committee is given a badge and the members of the committee a badge and sign of office; the tyler gets a badge and sign and is conducted to his post.

You start out as a member of a private lodge, and can then progress up through district and county to Grand Lodge. If you are one of those people who immerse themselves in the institution, you could hold four offices simultaneously, say as Worshipful Master of your private lodge, district secretary, county grand treasurer and deputy Grand Master.

There are very few Orangemen who don’t think the Order is top-heavy with chiefs, but that is part of the fun. It means that almost anyone can acquire a title which makes him a man of some consequence.

The official Order of Business at a lodge meeting is as follows:

1. The chair to be taken by the superior or senior officer present.

2. The deputy chair by the next in order.

Here is a typical ritualized exchange:

WORSHIPFUL MASTER: Bro. Deputy Master, what is the first duty of Bro. Orangemen when opening a Lodge?

DEPUTY MASTER: To see that the Lodge is Tyled, and that all present are in good standing and entitled to remain.

WORSHIPFUL MASTER: See the duty performed.

DEPUTY MASTER: Bro. Inside Tyler, see that the Lodge is Tyled.

3. A Tyler, or Tylers, to be appointed to keep the door.

4. A Steward, or Stewards, to preserve order.

5. The opening prayer to be read by the [clerical] Chaplain (if present), the brethren standing.

Gracious and Almighty God, Who in all ages hast shown Thy Almighty power in protecting righteous Sovereigns and States, we yield Thee hearty thanks for the merciful preservation of Thy true religion, hitherto, against the designs of its enemies.

We praise Thee for raising up for our deliverance from tyranny and arbitrary power, Thy servant, King William III, Prince of Orange; and we beseech Thee, for Thy honour and Thy Name’s sake, for ever to frustrate all the designs of wicked men against Thy holy religion, and not to suffer its enemies to triumph; defeat their counsels, abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their devices.

Deliver, we pray Thee, the members of the Church of Rome from error and false doctrine, and lead them to the truth of that Holy Word which is able to make them wise unto salvation. Grant, O Lord, that Thy Holy Spirit may guide and direct our deliberations, so that in all our words and works we may glorify Thy Holy Name.

We beseech Thee to bless every member of the Orange Institution with all Christian virtues. Bless us with brotherly love and loyalty. Take away everything that may hinder our godly union and concord, so that we may henceforth be of one heart and of one soul united in holy bonds of truth and peace, of faith and charity, and may, with one mind and one mouth, glorify Thee, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This is followed by the Lord’s Prayer.

6. A portion of Scripture to be read, the brethren standing.

7. Proceedings of last meeting to be read and confirmed.

8. General qualifications to be read.

9. Admission of candidates of last meeting.

10. Preliminary communications to be read or made.

11. Dues and payments to be collected.

12. Appeals relating to election to be heard and decided.

13. Election of officers.

14. Letters and other communications (if any) to be read.

15. Business arising out of either of the latter.

16. Election of candidates according to 2nd and 3rd Law.

17. Appeals (not against elections) to be heard and disposed of.

18. Reports from inferior Lodges to be heard and decided.

19. General business to be transacted.

20. Names of candidates for next meeting to be read.

21. The closing prayer to be read in the same manner as the opening one.

AT MEETINGS FOR ELECTIONS

NOTE: Articles 8, 9, 16 and 20 to be observed in Private Lodges only; Articles 12, 17 and 18 to be observed in all except Private Lodges. The others to be observed in all Lodges.

Here is the brief closing ceremony:

WORSHIPFUL MASTER: Deputy Master and brethren, stand to order and assist me to close this lodge.

CHAPLAIN: Almighty God, Who art a strong tower of defence unto Thy servants against the face of their enemies, we humbly beseech Thee of Thy mercy to deliver us from those great and imminent dangers by which we are now encompassed. O Lord, give us not up as a prey to our enemies, but continue to protect Thy true religion against the designs of those who seek to overthrow it, so that all the world may know that Thou art our Saviour and mighty Deliverer: through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

WORSHIPFUL MASTER: Deputy Master and brethren, I declare this Lodge closed until our next regular meeting, except in case of emergency, of which members shall receive, under Seal, due and timely notice.

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN

CHAPLAIN: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with us all. Amen.

The rituals and ceremonies are comforting for many Orangemen; the business part of the meeting drives many of them mad. ‘Two hours of nonsense,’ reported one to me, ‘on when the spring-cleaning would be done, because of the complication of there being a children’s crèche in the lodge in the mornings. Everyone had a point of view. It was eventually decided to wait till Christmas when there wouldn’t be a crèche. But then there was a problem with the normal date of the annual service. There was much carry-on about which day and what time. It was eventually decided to leave the date as it was. Are these,’ he added, ‘the people that are supposed to hold the line when the whole place is going up in flames? If the Provies only knew.’

‘There’s no doubt about it that the meetings are boring for young people,’ said another. ‘What young fella of eighteen or nineteen years of age wants to go there on a Friday night? Some of the chairmen, they’re mebbe sixty or seventy and they’ve nowhere else to go and they’d like it to go on to half ten or eleven at night. I remember one particular night there wasn’t any business as such and the chairman got out the last three electricity bills to have a discussion. We could have read the minutes of the last one, had a ten-minute chat and gone home. I laughed that night.’

Most lodges try to achieve consensual agreement before anything is voted on, so everyone has a chance to get a word in. The more people who do, the more the issues become muddied.

‘Get the business over quickly,’ said a competent master. ‘Then tea-bags, sugar, boil the kettle, have a drop of tea. Bring a couple of packets of biscuits, a few buns, and sit around for an hour or so and have a yarn. That’s what makes a lodge, you know. A drop of tea and a bit of fellowship. It makes the night, you know.’

It wouldn’t do in the Shankill Road, where the alcohol would be brought out after the closing ceremony, but the principle is the same.

So, too, is the way the brethren look after each other. All the loyal institutions contribute to an organization helping orphans of Orangemen or women; when a brother or sister dies, their lodge will help out financially and practically and there will be help during bad times. There is also a strong sense of loyalty to the disabled. Family values being what they are in Northern Ireland, the mentally and physically handicapped are far more a part of their family and the community than in more modern and secular societies and there are Orangemen with mental and physical disabilities. Sandy Row, No. 5 District, for instance, is passionately proud of ‘Oor Wee Wullie’, William Bloomer, who joined a junior lodge in 1982, ‘when he began to play a full part in all the activities of his junior lodge, including football. Wor. Bro. Eddie Wright was worried that the other boys in the lodge would not be sufficiently considerate of Billy, but in the event, their willingness to carry Billy, with his wheelchair, upstairs to the lodge room and down again amazed him. When the lodge went on parade, the members took turns to push Billy along in his wheelchair without any prompting from the senior members.’

Billy Bloomer’s ambition was to be a lecturer, and although his training was interrupted by a serious operation, he gained his lecturer’s certificate in 1990. To mark the event, members of the class presented him with an inscribed ‘Spirit of ‘88 Bible which Billy carries proudly to church,’ continued the anonymous article in a Sandy Row Orange publication:

The real test for any lecturer occurs when he gives the lecture and address in his own private lodge for the first time.

Billy’s style and delivery so impressed the members of [LOL] 1064 they gave him a standing ovation. Not surprisingly, the lodge elected him to the office of First Lecturer, and Billy’s greatest pleasure is to take the floor and give instruction to new members of the Order.

The difficulties that William has overcome in his short life have been many, but the smiling face with which he greets his brethren helps to put one’s own problems into perspective …

‘Wee Wullie’ is looking forward to parading to the ‘field’ on the Twelfth for, as he says, ‘while others complain of sore feet, it’s just a pushover for me’.

To the eye of the 1990s, that might sound patronizing, but to William Bloomer and his brethren, it is simply an acknowledgement of the fellowship and the respect the Ulster Protestant feels for those who know how to endure suffering without bitterness.

The Royal Arch Purple and the Royal Black Preceptories

When you have been initiated as an Orangeman, you have taken the Orange degree. You then go through a similar test, usually within six months to a year, to acquire the Purple. The history and nature of degrees are of absorbing interest to many Orangemen and of very little interest to anyone else. They take their meaning of the word from the question of Isaiah in 2 Kings 20.9: ‘Shall the shadow go forth ten degrees or go back ten degrees?’ Degrees are therefore a measure of spiritual movement and are intended to deepen biblical knowledge.

Traditionally, there has been a difference between those who want to keep ritual to a minimum and those who thoroughly enjoy it. Some Orange leaders banned rituals and degrees borrowed from Freemasonry, but those had been greatly enjoyed by simple people who wanted some mystery in their lives. The Royal Arch Purple Order, which these days is tolerated by Grand Lodge, was founded to preserve an outlawed degree. It prides itself ‘on having a legitimate and historical claim to be the inheritors of the [Orange Order’s] original initiation rituals and ceremonies’. The Grand Black Chapter of the Royal Black Institution traces its origins back to the Knights Hospitallers and the Knights of Malta; it came into existence shortly after the Orange Order. Many people join because they feel it offers a spiritual dimension.

‘The Black would have to be more scriptural and more Bible-based, with Bible-teaching and that,’ said a Mourne Blackman. ‘Basically our Black meeting was like a gospel meeting. The leaders of the preceptory were all Christian fellows. The degrees would have been taught in that way. Degrees are really the drama of asking the questions behind the story. So that would occupy most of the time. My main reason for being in the institution was religious.’

‘I joined the Black because I liked the parade in Scarva,’ said one member. ‘It was very well disciplined and well controlled, with good bands, good music. And because I was told all along that the Black institution was actually the main institution that taught the biblical principles of the Protestant faith in the various degrees that you went through. And there was more scope for teaching within it and getting our own people to have a greater knowledge of what our faith is about. The Orange wouldn’t have that capacity.’

‘The Black is a very graceful, decorous, sedate organization,’ another Blackman explained. ‘The Grand Master is in his flowing robes and the Grand Black Chapter has a procession into the chapter room with the mace being borne in front of him.’

A mutual Orange friend who has never been attracted by the Black was listening keenly. ‘It’s a bit popish, isn’t it?’ he commented, not very seriously, but with some truth. ‘No, it’s ceremonial.’ ‘Popery. Sheer undiluted popery.’ ‘Listen to Oliver Cromwell,’ laughed the Blackman. And we fell into an absorbing discussion as to whether it was permissible to have a cross in a church and whether they thought Cromwell had been right to try to destroy all religious statuary.

Chapters of the Royal Arch Purple meet primarily to initiate Orangemen into the Royal Arch Purple degree in a ritual more elaborate than the Orange and the Purple and involving a lot of ‘travel’. Black preceptories offer ten elaborate degrees: Royal Black, Royal Scarlet, Royal Mark, Apron and Blue, Royal White, Royal Green, Royal Gold, Star and Garter, Crimson Arrow, Link and Chain, and Red Cross. Where Orangemen and members of the Royal Arch Purple call each other Brother (and write to each other as Bro.), Blackmen call each other Sir Knight. However outsiders may view all this, there is no doubting its importance to many of their members. ‘I gained great spiritual depth from going through the degrees,’ said one of my friends. ‘The ritual, the tests, the questions and answers, the drama, brought the Bible stories they were based on home to me. And the morals drawn were right.’

‘It depends on how you’re able to receive it,’ said a Black lecturer. ‘You only go a wee bit at a time. There’s a lesson in every degree and the greatest lesson that I can find from any of them is where the children of Israel on the other side of Jordan built the altar and then the bigger part of their brethren saw it and thought they were worshipping false gods. And they condemned their brethren.

‘And then they found out the truth – that they had built it to God and that their brethren were true Israelites, but that they had condemned them without one particle of evidence being produced. The lesson I learned I teach candidates is if you made up your mind, saying you’ve had a mouthful of this boy and you were just going to give him a hiding the night, just stop and think and don’t make a hasty judgment on him. Wait. And tomorrow when you waken you’ll have a different picture. I explain that to them.’

‘The acting out of Bible stories and the signs and emblems and all that are rather like mystery plays,’ points out an historically-minded Blackman. ‘They helped illiterate people like many of our early members to remember scriptural truths. When properly performed by a good lecturer, these stories and truths can leave an imprint. And the tradition remains a good one. Many of our people are not book-minded, but they like and can relate to imagery.’

The role of the lecturer is crucial. They are part of an oral tradition: they explain the stories, teach degree candidates their responses and play a crucial part in the ceremonies. It is because they believe that the degree system helps people lead a better life, that so many of them give up an enormous amount of their time to pass on the oral tradition to their brethren.

Read with imagination (and with the information on Arch Purple and Black emblems given in the next chapter), ‘The Black Man’s Dream’, a song written around 1795, gives a good indication of what is involved in the ‘travel’.

One night I thought a vision brought

Me to a spacious plain,

Whereon its centre stood a mount,

Whose top I wished to gain;

Orange, blue, and purple, too,

Were given me to wear,

And for to see the mystery

They did me thus prepare.

My guide a pack placed on my back –

With pillars of an arch –

A staff and scrip placed in my hand,

And thus I on did march;

Through desert lands I travelled o’er,

And the narrow road I trod,

Till something did obstruct my path

In the form of a toad.

So then I saw what did me awe,

Though wandering in a dream

A flaming bush, though unconsumed,

Before me did remain;

And as I stood out of the wood

I heard a heavenly sound,

Which made me cast my shoes away,

For it was holy ground.

Two men I saw, with weapons keen,

Which did me sore annoy –

Unto a pyramid I ran

That standing was hard by;

And as I climbed the narrow way,

A hand I there did see,

Which layed the lofty mountains

In the scale of equity.

Blue, gold, and black about my neck,

This apparition placed –

Into a chariot I was put,

Where we drove off in haste:

Twelve dazzling lights of beauty bright

Were brought to guide my way,

And as we drove thro’ cypress shades

One of them did decay.

Near to a mount I saw a fount

Of living water flow;

I being dry, they did reply,

To drink you there may go;

The mystic cup I then took up,

And drank a health to all

That were born free and kept their knee

From bowing unto Baal.

‘I think we have to deal with the image of secrecy,’ says William Bingham. ‘Too many people see the Black as being almost masonic, which it isn’t. As a group of people who have hidden agendas and secret meetings and people fishing for jobs for the boys. So I think the institution has to become more open. It has to be prepared to come forward and say, you know, this is what our degrees are about without going into great detail. We should explain to people the meanings of the degrees.

‘We’ve tried to do this in Markethill District where about four years ago we started public meetings once a month during the months of November through to March where the scriptures related to each of the degrees were read and explained. And when we’d gone through the degrees we brought in the banners – one banner a night from each preceptory – and looked at the picture – usually a picture relating to one of the degrees – and explained to people the significance of the emblems and the signs. Things which if they are good and proper and shed light on life from scripture, are not to be kept in the dark but to be brought in the open.’

The Apprentice Boys

The Apprentice Boys, though Protestant, are essentially secular and their club meetings therefore are primarily social. ‘I’m not a member of the Orange,’ said one. ‘But we get called “Orange bastards” anyway.

‘I joined for traditional reasons. My father was in it and my son’s in it. It is a city-based organization with the headquarters here in Londonderry. People join to keep up tradition. Most Protestants in Londonderry are now Apprentice Boys, though the business and professional people have mostly opted out over the last thirty or forty years. It’s now mainly working class. People with a shop wouldn’t want to be seen as one tradition only and perhaps lose custom from the majority of the citizens who are about 70 per cent nationalists.

‘The ABs believe that the siege was one of the most historic events in the British Isles and all citizens should be proud of it. We see ourselves as keepers of the true tradition of that siege, because no one else has bothered down through the years. And in that remembrance, what basically we’re doing is remembering the triumph of spirit and the supreme sacrifice made by up to 10,000 of those defenders. The tercentenary of that event in 1989 was really basically only celebrated here although it should have been celebrated all over the British Isles.’

There are no masonic overtones among the Apprentice Boys, no secret signs or grips. Essentially, it is historically rather than religiously driven, with its activities centred on its two main parades in August and December. With about an eighth of the number of members of the Orange Order, it means that the vast majority of Apprentice Boys would be Orangemen, but many Orangemen would not be Apprentice Boys. ‘We think we’re more unique than the Orange,’ observed a senior Apprentice Boy. ‘Wherever you live, you can only be initiated as a full member in Derry. And we believe that we have more companionship and are that wee bit more special than the Orange.’

What members of the Northern Irish loyal institutions go home to after meetings of their lodges, chapters, preceptories and clubs

‘Their houses are like little palaces,’ used to be said of the Belfast Protestant working class. Protestants said it with pride; Catholics with a kind of patronizing contempt. Certainly, if you had no other clues, you could tell a Protestant from a Catholic street by the state of most of the gardens and what is visible of the front room, as you can tell which church they are going to from the neatness and formality of their Sunday-morning clothing.

A passion for cleanliness as an adjunct of godliness is as strange to my culture as our cheery indifference is to theirs. To the most bigoted Protestants, Catholics are dirty and untidy; to bigoted Catholics, Protestants are obsessively house-proud and fail to understand that life is for living and that it is more important to have fun with your friends than to polish the furniture. And if both the stereotypes are uncharitable in their application, there is nevertheless a lot of truth in them. Since I began to stay in Ulster Protestant, mostly Presbyterian, homes, I look about my house with a new and rather depressed eye.

The sheer fact of cultural separation means that differences in living conditions are so great as to provide a culture shock. ‘George is going over to London,’ observed my friend Henry to me a few months ago, assuming, I realized, that I would offer a bed if one were free. I decided to confront the matter head on. ‘Henry,’ I said, ‘I’ll get him a bed but, as things stand, I can have no Presbyterians in my house. He’d die of shock.’ ‘But he’s a lax Presbyterian,’ said Henry. ‘Not when it comes to houses, he isn’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve been to his, and it’s as clean as everyone else’s.’ So as I do with all bedless Presbyterians, I found George quarters with an English friend whose house would not frighten him and I continue to invite to my disorganized and dusty house only Irish Catholics and assorted bohemians.

There is a certain uniformity about the Presbyterian home. I’ve never been in one without being reminded of the centrality of family life, of ordered relationships, of industry and of thriftiness – which is, however, tempered by tremendous generosity and hospitality. The people of Northern Ireland, Protestant and Catholic, nationalist and unionist, republican and loyalist, have many characteristics in common, of which the most agreeable is tremendous warmth and kindness to any stranger who is not thought to be the enemy.

There is a difference of degree about the generosity. My mother, who grew up in the south of Ireland as a game-keeper’s daughter on an Anglo-Irish estate, was an inveterate observer of cultural differences between southern Protestants and Catholics. ‘You go into hospital,’ I remember her explaining, ‘and a Catholic friend will arrive laden with grapes and chocolates and flowers and spend an hour with you and never come back because she has run out of money and is ashamed to return empty-handed. The Protestant, on the other hand, will come in bearing a modest gift, will stay for twenty minutes or so and will then come back regularly.’

Presbyterian houses tend to be neat and spotless but cosy, the kind of home where people have slippers and candlewick dressing-gowns; if you go out infrequently and work hard you want to be comfortable at home. In addition to a three-piece suite, the most striking object in the living-room will be the enlarged, framed photographs on the windowsills, the table and the wall – the wedding photograph of the owners of the house, photographs of their parents, their siblings and their children, of big family groups and of their own children and grandchildren at various stages of development and at key moments like graduation and marriage. No child growing up in a house like that can think other than that he is the centre of his parents’ lives. It is that same family-orientation that makes so many Orange parades a happy family event.

Books, other than the Bible, are uncommon except in the houses of ministers and of teachers, but even there they will tend to be tucked away in a separate study. There is no clutter of papers or newspapers and few, sometimes no, objects. There might in some houses be a glass bookcase for treasures, with a heavy emphasis on Tyrone crystal wedding gifts too special to be used. (In the other community you’re more likely to have most of your fragile wedding gifts broken within a year or so of marriage courtesy of the exuberant clumsiness of yourself or your guests.) There will be a plethora of little tables so placed to ensure every person sitting in that living-room can eat and drink comfortably, for from the moment you come through the door, the lady of the house is preparing a tray full of food and drink: tea or coffee, two or three kinds of biscuits and home-made cake.

If you are there at a meal time you’ll be offered meat and potatoes and two kinds of sweet. If it’s not a meal time and they discover that you’ve missed your dinner (one o’clock) or your tea (six o’clock), your hostess will race to the kitchen to make piles of sandwiches, and fetch the home-made apple pie or whatever else is necessary to save you from starvation. Ulster Protestants are terrified lest their guests die of hunger; Ulster Catholics lest they die of thirst. Mind you, while drink is rarely on offer in a Protestant home as a part of normal hospitality, the occasional host might offer whiskey. And if you ever find yourself in a pub with a drinking Protestant, they are as lavish as any of their Catholic counterparts.

By any standards, the kindness is stunning. Arrive at a stranger’s house for a night with no luggage, as I have done, and slippers and a cosy dressing-gown and spare toothbrushes and toiletries are pressed upon you with enthusiasm and efficiency. And people will put themselves out for you to an extraordinary degree. They think nothing of going thirty miles out of their way to pick you up or drive you somewhere. It’s as if the sheer order and routine of their lives makes it possible for you to be accommodated however demanding are your needs.

The perception of Ulster Protestants as dour and taciturn does not long survive spending time in their houses, for they absolutely love talking and stay up late with any visitor. I’ve sat up till two in the morning and later having thoroughly enjoyable conversations with the most upright, temperate and even teetotal of citizens.

Orange, Black or Apprentice Boy meetings can be fitted into an orderly existence. The wives know when the husbands are going out, where they’re going and who they will be with. Reactions to these activities go across the spectrum from an old-fashioned reverence for the man’s important business to a genial acceptance that they’re making a mystery out of a simple get-together. And in the rural areas at least, sanity and tolerance dominate the women’s reaction to their men’s activity; it is understood that men want to be together and that this provides an excuse. ‘How have you stood it?’ I asked one woman whose husband was so heavily involved in the Freemasons, the Orange and the Black that he was frequently out four to five evenings a week. ‘I know he’ll never come back drunk,’ she said.

* This is a serious cultural contrast with Irish Catholics, who blaspheme eloquently, imaginatively, profusely, unselfconsciously and with no intention whatever of giving offence. My language improves out of all recognition when I associate with most Orangemen. However, my brother points out that Protestants and Catholics are as bad as each other when it comes to claiming blasphemously that God is on their side.

* It is insufficiently appreciated in the Republic of Ireland that while the vast majority of Catholics refused to give their loyalty to the Northern Ireland state, most of those Protestants, including Orangemen, who found themselves on the wrong side of the border after Partition were never disloyal to the new state. I’ve seen on Orange parades in Northern Ireland those brave little contingents from Cavan or Monaghan or Donegal, still stoutly demonstrating their pride in their religion and their affection for the crown, before going home to the state which they have served loyally. Unlike most nationalists in Northern Ireland, southern Orangemen were good losers.

* Those Orangemen who worried that I might expose their cherished secrets to the world hadn’t realized that most of this information was published as early as 1835, in appendices to the Report of the Commons Select Committee on Orange Lodges. Tony Gray in his book on the Orange Order also went into considerable detail. The ritual is necessarily rather dull and repetitive; what I am providing here is just a cross-section of what is most important. I am breaking no confidences, and keeping no secrets of any significance.

† Goat-rides, however, are a part of ancient rural pagan rituals.

* James Wilson in ‘The Making of the Orange Order’, a video which includes footage of preliminaries to an initiation ritual.

* They can, however, laugh at their own bigotry. There’s the famous joke about the dying Orangeman who asked for a priest. ‘What do you mean, a priest?’ asked his one of his brethren. ‘You’ve been an Orangeman for sixty years. Why do you want to see a priest?’ ‘I want to become a Roman Catholic.’ ‘A Roman Catholic? Have you gone mad?’ ‘I have not. It’s just that I’d rather one of theirs died than one of ours.’

* It was sold in spring 2000.

* Josias Cunningham tells me that ‘champagne and canapes are foreign to Eldon’s Twelfth; we subsist on beer, tea and sandwiches like the rest! And at least we do stay on the field; one of the unfortunate recent trends at the Belfast demonstration is for lodges to retire for a hearty lunch at an adjacent hall or other centre, leaving the “field” looking very empty for much of the day.’

* Like signs and grips, the original purpose of passwords was very serious: in the revolutionary period during which the Orange Order was founded, it was necessary to be able to tell friend from foe. Passwords do not change much with time. Typical would be one of those disclosed to a House of Lords Inquiry in 1825: “Thus shalt thou say unto the Children of Israel’ is answered with, ‘I Am, hath sent me unto you’.

3
Onlookers, Participants and Opponents: the Twelfth

Different viewpoints*

THE BIG, BIG COLOURFUL, noisy day that was the Twelfth had a special magic in the grey, sober Belfast of earlier times. Rowel Friers, the cartoonist, remembered sticking his head out of the bedroom window full of excitement:

I peered out to the right and there they were – the flying banners, the glinting instruments of the bands, and the bowler-hatted, white-gloved, navy-serge-suited and brown-booted Orange-sashed gentlemen of the Order, no brother’s tailoring outdoing another, highly respectable, dignified and erect, they march to the rhythm of their bands. Occasionally, one of them might deign to give a regal nod of the head to an onlooker known to him, and no doubt already approved of by his brethren as an acceptable outsider.

The swordbearers and deacon pole-carriers stepped out with all the demeanour of generals, now and then taking a peep at their pride and joy – the banner. Most of these, I was to learn later, were painted by a Mr Bridgett, a craftsman specializing in that particular art form. This knowledge I gleaned from the son of the said gentleman, who I met at art college some years later. Many and varied they were: gold, silver, orange, purple, blue, all the colours and more than could have adorned Joseph’s coat. From portraits of William in battle, to Queen Victoria and her Bible (‘the secret of England’s greatness’), churches, angels, the Rock of Ages, memorial portraits to worshipful brothers who had passed on to that higher and grander lodge in the sky, it was a travelling art exhibition, before anyone dreamed of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts or the Arts Council.

William Bingham, now a Presbyterian minister, reminisces about a much more recent period in County Armagh: ‘I first paraded with the institution in 1969 in Markethill, where I was brought up. I was about six years of age when my uncle took me and my brother and my cousin with him to hold the strings of the banner: my grandmother made little Orange collarettes for us.*

‘When you were growing up, you played at being Orangemen. Weeks before the Twelfth, all the youngsters in the town got together and had a ceremony in the yard and formed their own Orange Lodge – you’re talking about six-, seven-, eight-year-olds. And we used to get tin boxes and make banners out of cloth and sticks and we paraded by people’s houses or up and down the yard and we had a really good time together. We were very democratic in electing a worshipful master. We voted on it and usually everyone got their turn at it.

‘We really looked forward to the Twelfth: you used to think that when that was over, your summer was over. The highlight of it was gone. For us it was a day where you met all your friends from school that you hadn’t seen for the weeks of the summer holidays: maybe some of their fathers were on parade or some of them were in the bands playing the cymbal or the triangles or a wee accordion or something. You all met in the field and you had tea and sandwiches and then you played around for a while and then you came home again. It was just a unique occasion. There was nothing like it the rest of the year.

‘I suppose the things that you were mesmerized by were the colour – the paintings on the banners, the crowds of people – and the music – the bands. I really loved the silver bands. My father played the tenor horn and went on parade. My mother would have been making sandwiches: she did the picnic. And my sister, she didn’t get parading, only the boys. She was left out of it a wee bit.

‘For my aunts and great-aunts – many of whom were married to farmers – it was literally the only day out they got in the year. The Twelfth of July came and they worked hard to get the harvest cleared up and the best suits cleaned and looked after their husbands. Rarely if ever would they have been out anywhere else except church. Certainly they’d have had no holidays. I had uncles that wouldn’t miss the Twelfth of July, but they wouldn’t go to their own sons’ or nephews’ weddings.’

Elaine McClure, Worshipful Mistress of a women’s lodge, does not feel part of the community in nationalist Newry.

I do feel very close to my friends in that town, my neighbours, but I feel that’s completely different from, if you like, as a person coming from the community I come from, trying to identify with the symbols of local government in that town.

As T. S. Eliot says: ‘I can connect nothing with nothing’ … But certainly within the company of people who share the same culture as I do, I can connect. I can connect with their outlook, with the music, with the symbols on the banner, with the ethos and the reason behind a social gathering.

I walk on the Twelfth – I don’t march … My blood family … introduced me to the Twelfth and now my Orange family take me along with them on the Twelfth of July. I walk in the road with the men of Sheepbridge.

I know those men. I know their ladies. I know their families, I know who they are and they’re good, they’re decent people. And I walk with them and in the front is the band and my cousin’s in the band and I’m walking in the road and I’m thinking how like my uncle Joe our William is because Uncle Joe was the one who took me first to the Twelfth of July. And I walk in the road with them hoping they’re not going too quick and I’ve got the right shoes on my feet and then we wait at the hall and then when all the lodges come we all walk off again and the drum beat’s given and the banners are hoisted and we start on our way.

And I remember thinking last Twelfth of July how lucky I am to be part of this – and that’s not to deride anyone else who comes from a different culture – but how lucky I am to be walking with such good, kind people and to have the colour and the music that I can listen to. To meet up with people that perhaps I haven’t seen for the last twelve months. All you have to do is just say: ‘Hello, how are you?’ and the connection is made and the friendship is there. And to go back to the hall at the end of the night and have a meal and to sit again in the company of the sisters and the brethren of Sheepbridge – it’s a wonderful warm feeling just of a family coming together. The Twelfth of July is our family occasion.

However, David Cook, Alliance politician and ex-chairman of the police authority, puts forward a view very common among middle-class Protestants whose liberalism doesn’t extend to trying to understand the ordinary Orangeman.

The first thought about the Twelfth each year is how can we get away. I have spent most Twelfths in Donegal (often infuriated by RTE’s [Radio Telefis Eireann] naive view of the Twelfth as no more than a folksy cultural festival). I have been lucky enough to be in Northern Ireland on only a handful of Twelfths in my life. One was a memorably hot day in the middle Seventies when I pushed our baby daughter in a pram from the Ormeau Road along the embankment all the way to Shaw’s Bridge where I saw the drunken crowds in full swing.

I have never actually set out to watch a Twelfth parade. I have never taken my children to watch one. I have never believed that Protestantism needs to be, or indeed, can be defended by the usual public manifestations of Orangeism. And I have never been taken in by the claims that there is no other purpose in them than the display of a much loved cultural tradition. I have always known that one of the historical purposes of those public manifestations, and this remains true today for some Orangemen some of the time, is to annoy and antagonize Catholics.

The claim that the Twelfth is the greatest cultural festival in Europe, with its bands, banners and music, may, I think, be true. But I do not believe the assertion that the Twelfth is no more than a good-natured cultural event and a large family picnic. That is the purest hypocrisy and the biggest lie. The problem which the Orange Order has to face is that very few people outside their community believe the lie.

Marietta Farrell, lecturer and SDLP activist, had never heard of the Twelfth until she went to Northern Ireland from the Republic as a student in the 1970s.

I found the whole thing quite colourful and quaint if somewhat threatening. I was bemused at the sight of so many men, in what was to me, City of London business dress, looking so intent and serious. I admired the skill and the colour of the bands but I found their swagger and the wording of their songs intimidating and offensive. I was also surprised at the lack of women in the ‘celebration’. From what I could see, women stood on the sidelines and cheered the men. I wondered why loyalist women were not more central in their important annual celebration. [Until Drumcree 1996] I neither thought nor learnt much more about the Twelfth. It seemed to have nothing to do with me.

To the best of my knowledge, I was never in the company of an Orangeman.

Decorations and associated festivities

Glen Barr, famous for his leadership of the Ulster Workers’ Strike in 1974 and now a community worker, grew up in Londonderry.

Through all the seasons of marbles, hoops, bows and arrows, cowboys and indians, Easter eggs, Christmas stockings and bin lids to sleigh with, we always knew when the big day was near.

The Craigavon Pipe Band which practised at the top of King Street at the back of Harry McLaughlin’s carpenter shop and which we all joined at ten or eleven years of age, was at it three nights a week instead of the customary Wednesday nights. The men and women of the street were making bows from the wood shavings from Harry McLaughlin’s and dyeing them red, white and blue in tin baths at the back of the band shed. The other emblems on the Arch were cleaned up and painted and all the light bulbs checked and renewed where necessary. Buntings were being rescued from old sacks and tied across the street from downpipe to downpipe.

Weeks before we headed off with hatchets and ropes to hack down branches and small trees in St Columb’s Park, making sure the ‘look-outs’ were well positioned to follow every move of the park warden, and run the gauntlet in the Limavady Road pulling the biggest load imaginable for our ‘Eleventh’ night bonfire. Doing your watch in the back lane to make sure the boys from Alfred Street, Florence Street, York Street and Bond Street didn’t raid the trees and rubber tyres for their fires.

The ‘Eleventh’ night in King Street was like a fairy tale with singing, dancing and spud roasting in the ashes. There was the usual crate of stout for the men and the navy men from the Sea Eagle Barracks next to King Street, could always be relied upon to bring out the rum and show off women from the area known as ‘Navy Dolls’ hanging onto their arms …

This was my ‘Twelfth’. Collecting for the bonfire, roasting the spuds, the dancing, the singing on the ‘Eleventh’ night in The Fountain. Getting up on the ‘Twelfth’ morning and putting on the kilt, shawl, those damned spats, and the rest of the Craigavon Pipe Band uniform knowing the girls from school would be following the band all day.

The flowers must not be forgotten. Orange lilies and sweet william for the adorning of banners and drums and hats and buttonholes are easily procured in the country, but harder in parts of the city short on gardens. George Chittick recalls: ‘For many many years our district always put Orange lilies on the top of the bannerette. Billy, the secretary of the district, says to me: “George, there’s a man coming down – he’s called Nolan – and he’ll give you a bunch of Orange lilies on the Eleventh night.” So this wee man come down and he said to me: “Is your name Chittick?” I said, “That’s right.” He says, “My name’s Nolan. Here’s a bunch of Orange lilies. Now, when you’re up the Lisburn Road tomorrow morning, you look out for me and I’ll wave at you.” So I went up the road with the lilies on the bannerette and there’s this wee man standing. He smiled at me and I nodded and he said, “Dead on.” So that was all right.

‘Billy says to me. “George, you know that wee man Nolan come down to see you.” I says, “Aye.” “He’s an RC.” “Is that right?” “I work with him and him and me were friends and he always said to me he had a huge set of Orange lilies in his back garden and he’d give some for the bannerette.” “Dead on.” So it went on for a number of years. Up to 1994, Mr Nolan come down every Eleventh night with these flowers and I took them off him and thanked him very much and put them on the bannerette. 1995: I was down that night and no Orange lilies arrived. I thought it was because of Drumcree. I said, “Maybe that’s it. Maybe he doesn’t want to.” But then about two months later on the Lisburn Road this lady comes to me and says, “Is your name Chittick? Are you from Sandy Orange Hall?” I said, “That’s correct.” She says, “Well, I’m Mr Nolan’s daughter and I’m sorry to tell you me father passed away last May.” “Oh, I says, I’m very sorry about that.” She says, “I made an awful blunder. Before he died he said to me: ‘Don’t you forget on the Eleventh night to take the Orange lilies down to Sandy Row’, and,” she says, “I forgot.” And I say, “It’s just one of those things. You can’t do nothing about it. Don’t worry about it.” “No,” she says, “but you’ll never get any more Orange lilies.” I says, “Why?” And she says, “It’s a big house and I had to sell it.” So I says, “I understand that, ma’am. I understand that.” But she says, “I have a wee present for you.” And she brought me out four bulbs. She says, “I rescued them.”

‘So they’re planted in my garden now and they will for ever and ever I hope be the lilies that will be carried on the bannerette.’

The clothes

‘What should I wear to go to an Orange parade?’ I asked my friend Janet, who knows about such things because she was brought up Presbyterian in Cookstown and had an Orange father.

‘Frock,’ she said firmly. ‘No rocks.’

For Orangemen, sartorial decisions are a matter for each lodge. Standards vary dramatically. At the most respectable end, particularly in rural areas, clothes are very important. There are Orangemen who would never have bought a suit if it weren’t for the Twelfth and whose brethren would be horrified if they arrived with a speck of dirt on the white gloves or a dent in their bowlers. And there will be strong views about whether flowers should decorate hats and jackets.

Why bowlers? Because they were a mark of respectability for Orangemen’s fathers and their fathers’ fathers, and in a deeply conservative culture there has to be a very good reason to make any break with tradition. That is tough on those who hate and loathe their bowler hats. There is the occasional middle-aged man who is enhanced by a bowler, but on the whole it is an unflattering article and on some people looks downright ridiculous.

At the other end of the spectrum – most likely to be the Belfast semi-paramilitary world – there are lodges where no one cares what you wear. To my eye, trained as I am in the ways of County Tyrone, T-shirts, tattooed arms and earrings don’t go well with collarettes, but then I would be wary of arguing the point with the kind of people who think they do.

Orangewomen have greater problems. For a start, they can parade only if invited formally by the relevant hosts and if the Women’s Grand Lodge agrees. Northern Irish society, especially in the rural areas, has both the virtues and defects of 1950s Britain. My experience of Orangemen is that in many respects they seem to be admirable husbands, but they mostly expect their wives to be admirable housekeepers at home preparing the sandwiches rather than going on parade.

Olive Whitten, councillor and deputy Grand Mistress of the Association of Loyal Orangewomen of Ireland, has no complaints:

I have no regrets at our members not being invited to take part in the parade. I enjoy standing on the sideline, watching the parade from beginning to end although my one desire always was to have been a playing member of a band.

There are some parading ladies’ lodges, however, who face trickier decisions about clothes than do their brethren. Some turn all the sisters out identically dressed in, for example, purple suits and white hats and shoes, but there are few outfits that suit all women, and the results are usually bad news for some. An alternative approach is to have an agreed colour but allow different styles. One lodge produced a enormous collection of different white hats. Others adopt a more laissez-faire approach, but still require suits and hats and gloves. And the most bohemian let their members wear what they like, secure in the knowledge that they will be properly turned-out in their best Sunday attire.

The regalia

When it comes to regalia, there are clear rules. Ordinary members of private lodges of Orange Degree only are entitled to wear an Orange sash or usually a collar (nowadays called a collarette, though many Orangemen still call it a sash) about four inches wide, with the lodge number displayed in front; a few lodges wear blue for historical reasons everyone seems to have forgotten. Having the Purple Degree requires the wearing of a sash or collarette about four and a half inches wide with a purple stripe. Members of the Royal Arch Purple have the colours reversed: purple with orange edging. Blackmen wear their Orange regalia when they parade on the Twelfth. On Royal Black Preceptory parades they wear black collarettes which may have several coloured stripes representing various of their ten degrees and presenting the symbolic connotations of a rainbow; they also wear masonic-style blue, fringed aprons and embroidered cuffs. The Apprentice Boys wear crimson sashes or collarettes to represent the blood spilt by the defenders during the Siege of Derry and the defiant flag flown from the cathedral tower.

The regalia that mean most to members of the loyal institutions, of course, are those handed down from father to son. ‘When I was eighteen, I joined my grandfather’s lodge,’ said one. ‘And my grandmother passed on his collarette, which had been his father’s collarette. I don’t wear his collarette now – it’s getting too old to wear. But it’s in a safe place and if my son wants to join I’ll pass it on to him.’

‘We treat our collarettes well, because they represent something important,’ said another, who has five from three different organizations. ‘It’s important to treat them with respect.’ (I saw a particularly graphic example of this at a parade where a group of Apprentice Boys could no longer contain themselves in the face of republican provocation. Before returning abuse and missiles, they took off their collarettes and put them in their pockets lest they dishonour them.)

District officers get to wear wider collars; county grand officers have silver fringes and Grand Lodge officers have gold fringes. Indications of office appear as, for instance, ‘WM’, ‘DM’, ‘S’, or ‘T’ (or even PWM for Past Worshipful Master) in front of the collarettes.

An Orangeman might wear no adornments on his collarette other than his lodge number and the insignia of his office, but many sport emblems and badges. (Apprentice Boys, being essentially secular, wear no emblems.) Emblems can be acquired rather on the charm-bracelet principle. The two most popular emblems are the self-explanatory CROWN and open BIBLE, which anyone can wear, as they can a representation of King William on his horse. Members of the Royal Arch Purple may also wear several others, including: an ANCHOR, symbolic of a safe arrival in the afterlife; the ARK OF THE COVENANT, ‘the visible evidence of God’s promise to be with and guide his people of Israel safely through life’; a COFFIN, as a reminder of mortality; an EYE, signifying God’s omniscience; a FIVE-POINTED STAR, a reminder of the five wounds of Christ; a LADDER, whose three steps represent Faith, Hope and Charity; NOAH’S ARK, the means by which God chose to save and regenerate life on earth, thus symbolizing ‘a better and purer life’; and a THREE-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK, symbolic of the light which is revealed by the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The Royal Black Institution has many more again which relate to the institution and its degrees, and are biblical and have strong overtones of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Among them are a BURNING BUSH; a LAMB, as in the Lamb of God; a little MAN WITH A BACKPACK, who represents a pilgrim, Joseph in Egypt; a RED HAND, a reference to the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand; a ROD WITH AN ENTWINED SNAKE, which harks back to Moses, whose rod became a snake and then changed back again; a SKULL AND CROSSBONES, which is the institution’s crest, representing mourning for Joseph when he was sold into slavery in Egypt and was given up for dead. The key emblem, however, is the RED CROSS which, since it represents the final degree, shows that you have taken all the others. It is red because Christ shed his blood, it is surrounded by a crown, because he was a king, but as with all Protestant crosses, it is empty, because Christ was resurrected.

Then there are badges or medals, which often relate to notable parades attended by the wearer, such as the Orange tercentenary celebration in Belfast, a Scottish Twelfth, a New Zealand jamboree or Drumcree 1995. ‘Some people stick a lot of rubbish on their collarettes,’ observed a senior Orangeman. ‘I hate that.’ Yet though like most of them he hates show, being by nature a squirrel, he has the largest private collection of badges, emblems and other memorabilia of any Orangeman I know. Most prized of all are service medals, sometimes those of a father or grandfather.

The banners

District, county and Grand Lodge officers are called upon to preside at many services and ceremonies, including the opening-up and closing-down of Orange Halls and the unfurling of new banners.

Banners are a great cause of both pride and worry to lodges. To the ordinary Orangeman, a banner sums up the spirit of his lodge. Although there is a fair amount of duplication of subjects, each banner is unique. Much deliberation will have gone into not just the choice of subject and artist, but the manner in which the lodge’s name and number will be presented and what colour and style and motifs should be used for the borders. The lodge member will know who painted it, where and when.

The downside is that banners are very vulnerable: after maybe a few dozen outings, batterings from wind and rain take a heavy toll. (They take a heavy toll on the standard-bearers too: in bad weather there is a constant battle just to keep the buffeted banner aloft, especially when its silk is weighed down by rain.) A lodge might have to requisition the painting of a new banner every ten years at a cost of maybe a thousand pounds. This will not only impose a financial burden which is serious for poor lodges, but may bring about disagreement between those of the brethren who want a new version of their old banner and those who want radical change.

As that student of parades Neil Jarman points out, while banners go back to the beginning of the Orange tradition, they developed extensively towards the end of the nineteenth century as unionism felt its identity under threat from Irish nationalism. ‘The banners became more standardized, more professional. The painting became of a better quality and the range of images expanded, so you moved away from the old images of a King Billy and the crown and the Bible to include a much greater range of heroes of Ulster unionism like Colonel Saunderson, later Carson, Craig. The elaboration of events from the Williamite wars and the massacre at the Bann in 1641 all appeared at those times along with biblical images which drew an analogy from the position of the Ulster Protestants to the Israelites in the biblical times.’

There is an enormous range of these large, colourful banners and they show pictorially the cultural reference points of the Protestant people. A major grievance in recent years was the BBC’s decision early in the 1980s to scrap television coverage of the Belfast Twelfth because, Orangemen think, of nationalist sensibilities. Even though in recent years there has been truncated coverage, what has been lost is the informed commentary on banners and bands that put the parade and the Orange Order in its historical and cultural context. These days, the media are interested in parades only if they provoke violence.

An Ulster Society survey identified thirteen categories of Orange banner. Many Orange and virtually all Black banners are BIBLICAL, the majority being Old Testament. The BUILDINGS represented are usually of local significance; most often they are churches. A typical example of the secular is Derrymore House, Bessbrook, carried by the local lodge because the Act of Union was signed there in 1800. The HOME RULE category depicts Ulster Protestantism in its most ‘no-surrender’ mode, with paintings of, for instance, the formation of the Ulster Volunteers. The HISTORICAL category covers events relating to the foundation of the Orange Order and the INDUSTRIAL particularly to the proud Belfast industrial past. Both WORLD WARS are there, the most moving image being that of the 36th Ulster Division, so many of whom were slaughtered at the Somme.

You have to be dead to be on a banner: popular PERSONALITIES are Winston Churchill, Oliver Cromwell and Sir James Craig, the long-serving prime minister of Northern Ireland: brethren murdered by the IRA during the TROUBLES sometimes become the subject of their lodge’s banner. Martin Luther is the reformer most often seen on REFORMATION banners and probably Queen Victoria among the ROYALTY; a very evocative banner in the latter category is that of the Great Northern True Blues, a Sandy Row railway employees’ lodge, showing a train festooned with union flags carrying King Edward VII to Belfast.

The largest category, of course, relate to the WILLIAMITE period; for example, the Mountjoy charging the boom at Derry, William crossing the Boyne, or the battle of Aughrim. All Apprentice Boys’ banners are to do with the Siege of Derry. Remaining banners are scooped up under the categories of OLD FLAGS OR BANNERS and MISCELLANEOUS, which include a British bulldog and Britannia.

Banners are as carefully cherished as collarettes. David Jones, who until his teens lived in Carleton Street Orange Hall – home to many Orange lodges, including Portadown district lodge,

Royal Black preceptories and Apprentice Boys clubs – where his father was caretaker, recalled one of the procedures before the Twelfth:

One of his other tasks was to extract the lodge banners from their storage places where they had been carefully laid aside from the previous year. Following the last Twelfth each banner would have been rolled up and placed inside its own long wooden box. These boxes would be taken out of their storage places, by now covered with a liberal sprinkling of a year’s undisturbed dust. When opened the banner would be unrolled, hooked on to the banner poles and carefully rested against the wall in one of the largest rooms in the building. The brass or chromium fittings that sat atop the banner poles would be polished until they gleamed. The early hanging of the banners also allowed time for any creases that had formed during storage in the material to fall out. With mention of the banner poles, quite often one of the problems faced was finding them, depending on who had put them away or where they had been left.

One of my lasting impressions of that era is the banners. I can well remember as a small child looking up at them – somewhat in awe all assembled in the one place, and each with its own unique large oil-painted scene. This was my art gallery. Before me were displayed likenesses of King William III on horseback, or arriving at Carrickfergus. A painting of Queen Victoria being presented with a Bible by one of her colonial subjects, the banner bearing the legend ‘The Secret of England’s Greatness’. Numerous biblical scenes were evident, amongst them Noah portrayed on the Ark with a bird returning with a twig in its beak. Then there were the banners depicting the ‘Bible and Crown’ and past remembered Orangemen of the area with stern emotionless faces. Still and silent they towered above me. In a few days I knew this quiet moment would change as the banners would take on a life of their own when they would leave the hall on parade. Once outside the banners, held high, would float in the breeze and seen from a distance the tops of the banner poles would bob up and down as they were carried in the procession.

The music

John Moulden, a lifelong student of traditional songs, points out that Orange culture can only be understood in the context of a wide range of music, stretching back through the centuries and across much of Britain, Ireland and Europe, belonging to a genre of songs dealing with everyday matters and events. Even the most strongly expressed Protestant sentiments in local Orange songs have at one time or another been voiced in parts of English traditional music.

Orange songs are of different kinds. Some of them are openly objectionable. Some of them refer to elements of Catholic doctrine in an opprobrious way. Some of them refer to party fights and give very very one-sided and objectionable accounts. On the other hand, the accounts of those same fights given by the other side are equally offensive.

Certainly many of the songs have been based – almost parodied – upon nationalist songs. There are some songs that are, for instance, similar in form to ‘The Wearing of the Green’. ‘The Sash’ – although not based on a sectarian Irish song – is based on an Irish song of possibly music-hall origin called ‘The Hat My Father Wore’ … They often see themselves as David, up against the world – the English establishment, the rest of Ireland …

There are large numbers of songs which look at incidents in Irish history … where Protestants were injured, assaulted or killed. And there are large numbers of songs which say, ‘Watch out. If you are not on your guard, these things are going to happen again.’

One old Orangeman whom I had the honour to talk to in his last years about songs and Orange songs in general was a pillar of his local Orange lodge and in fact a pillar of the district. He was a lecturer on Orange traditions and history and when I went and asked him, he refused to sing Orange songs to me on the grounds that he as an Orangeman had taken an oath to give offence to no man.

Moulden picked out ‘The Ould Orange Flute’ – a ‘rather amusing, fun-poking look at the distinctiveness between two groups of people’ – as being one of those songs that Catholics enjoy. (Indeed he suspects it may well have originated among Catholics as a satirical pastiche of Orange songs.)

In the County Tyrone, near the town of Dungannon,

Where many a ruction myself had a hand in,

Bob Williamson lived – a weaver by trade,

And all of us thought him a stout Orange blade.

On the twelfth of July as it yearly did come,

Bob played on the flute to the sound of the drum,

You may talk of your harp, your piano, your lute,

But nothing could sound like the ould Orange flute.

But this treacherous scoundrel took us all in,

For he married a Papish called Bridgit McGinn,

And turned Papish himself, and forsook the ould cause,

That gave us our freedom, religion and laws.

Now the boys in the townland made some noise upon it,

And Bob had to fly to the province of Connaught;

He fled with his wife and his fixings to boot,

Along with the others the ould Orange flute.

At the chapel on Sundays to atone for past deeds,

He said Paters and Aves and counted his beads,

Till after some time at the Priest’s own desire,

He went with his ould flute to play in the choir;

He went with his ould flute to play in the Mass,

But the instrument shivered and sighed, ‘Oh, alas!’

And for all he could blow, though it made a great noise,

The ould flute would play only, ‘The Protestant Boys’.

Bob jumped and he started and got into a splutter,

And threw his ould flute in the blessed holy water;

For he thought that this charm would bring some other sound,

But when he blew it again it played ‘Croppies Lie Down’.

And for all he could whistle, and finger, and blow,

To play Papish music he found it no go,

‘Kick the Pope’, ‘The Boyne Water’, and such like it would sound, But one Papish squeak in it just couldn’t be found.

At a council of priests that was held the next day,

The decided to banish the ould flute away,

For they couldn’t knock heresy out of its head,

So they bought Bob another to play in its stead.

So the ould flute was doomed and its fate was pathetic,

it was branded and burned at the stake as heretic;

While the flames roared around it they heard a strange noise,

‘Twas the ould flute still whistling, ‘The Protestant Boys’.

‘When I worked in Wexford [in the Irish Republic] years ago,’ remembered George Chittick, ‘that was my star turn. They couldn’t get enough of “The Ould Orange Flute”: I used to go into the bar in the hotel where I was staying. And it was great and there was good old crack and a good old laugh. I don’t drink, but I used to go down to sit with them and they used to sing away there and then they’d be shouting, “Come on, come on, you have to sing the ‘The Ould Orange Flute’.” They used to cheer. And then, “Give us ‘The Sash’, give us ‘The Sash’.” This was before the Troubles, may I say.’

Bands decide what to play. Lodges choose the bands. ‘In my young days, the bands were all flute bands,’ recalled Worshipful Master Charlton from Mourne. ‘There were no uniforms. And I remember our band had old police caps. I remember going and getting a bag full of discarded police caps and the women making white tops and putting a bit of elastic in them to go over the top of the caps. And getting blue ribbon and the women putting blue ribbons on them. And I remember going to Belfast and getting badges. The blue ribbons were because our lodges are blue.

‘Now we’ve an Irish pipe band here. In Mourne there are accordion bands, pipe bands and harp bands. I was just talking to a wee girl there, her harp and flute band, they won the Ulster championship in the Ulster Hall on Saturday. And they’ve practised in our hall. There’s better music now, but by and large the Orange hasn’t changed much. Only just the standard of living.’

There are devotees of all kinds of bands, but the instruments most associated with Ulster are the flute (or fife, the small, shriller version) and the drum. Alvin Mullan wrote in 1997:

My background is rooted in [the flute band] tradition and can be traced to the late nineteeth century, when on the Twelfth 1890 my great-grandfather Alvin Mullan began playing the fife along with the drums for an Orange lodge from Tullyhogue in Co. Tyrone, as part of the demonstration. Continuing this tradition, my grandfather William Mullan, a gifted drummer, led the drum corps in Killymoon Flute Band, the local part-music flute band from Cookstown, Co. Tyrone. Due to ill health my grandfather’s mantle was inherited by my father William Alvin Mullan, who led the drum corps of the band until it folded up in the 1970s (this band has recently been reformed under the same name and maintains the part-music flute band tradition in that area).

This background caused me, from an early age, to view the Twelfth as an occasion to listen to bands, view the impressive display of musical culture and long for the day when I could participate. This finally materialized on the Twelfth 1981 when I played the flute with Tullyhogue Flute Band in Cookstown on the return parade from the main demonstration. Thus my band career was launched and still continues with Corcrain Flute Band from Portadown (which I joined in 1985).

As a bandsman I regard the Twelfth as the most important parade of the year; all other parades prior to this are preparatory and any following are extra. The occasion demands much preparation. One’s flute must be in top working order, the uniform clean with trousers well pressed, the shirt snow-white and ironed in case the weather demands the removal of the tunic, shoes must be gleaming, and the music holder well polished. When the band moves off on the morning of the Twelfth it is really a most enjoyable and thrilling experience. All the preparation and months of practice result in a fine display of musical talent as the band plays through its march repertoire: Galanthia, The Bulgars’ Entry, Le Tambour Major, Our Director, The Pacer, Peace and Plenty, The Gladiator’s Farewell, Corcrain, Coeur de Lion and others.

In addition to the musical aspect of playing in a flute band on the Twelfth, there is also the opportunity to meet other bandsmen and listen to their music. There exists amongst bandsmen a great sense of comradeship and unity of purpose. The Twelfth provides opportunity to develop this by renewing friendships, discussing problems, swapping ideas, and reflecting on past Twelfths. As a bandsman the Twelfth means everything; it is the heart of the flute band tradition, its soul and life. Remove the Twelfth and the tradition will die.

In the early nineteenth century, Ulster flute bands came into existence, modelled on those that formed part of military bands. Initially, they played military music and paraded in martial style. Their repertoire broadened as their range of instruments increased; from 1907 these sophisticated part flute bands, complemented by a drum corps, have engaged in music contests.

The part flute bands are for connoisseurs; the ‘blood and thunder’ or ‘kick-the-pope’ bands are populist. Dominic Bryan, an academic who with Neil Jarman has done much to explain what parades are all about, exactly expresses my own mixed feelings about them.

Blood-and-thunder bands can be threatening to an outsider like myself and it is easy to appreciate why so many in the Catholic community treat them with a mixture of fear and loathing. On the other hand they are also the most entertaining part of the Twelfth in Belfast. They help create a sense of carnival which is in some contrast to the officials at the front of the parade and the religious service given at the field.

He remarks about the uniforms: ‘On the one hand you have plenty of sombre dark respectable suits whilst some of the bands are in bright orange, blue and purple uniforms. And there is invariably a group of young girls dressed in the latest fashion (or the latest Rangers shirt) walking alongside their band: the Twelfth is also about teenage sexuality.’

While most bands include women of all ages, teenage sexuality is most evident among the fife-and-drum groupies or the mini-skirted standard-bearers who march in front of the most villainous-looking bands. These bands have vastly increased in number over the last thirty years as a reaction to the Troubles. Many Orangemen who hate the militarism of these bands argue that they are a vital safety-valve for young people who might otherwise become involved in paramilitary violence and that their contact with the Orange Order is crucial. ‘I was not long a member of a flute band when one of our drummers was murdered by the IRA,’ one now senior Orangeman told me. ‘Some of us kids were full of rage. It was only the influence of older Orangemen in our lodge that stopped us getting guns; some of us would have gone out to get revenge.’

The flute bands also have the merit of being cheap. It is extremely expensive to support, for instance, a silver or a pipe band: £2,000 is nothing for a trombone. And for those lodges which hire bands, the choice can be between paying £500 for a silver band or £100 for the fife-and-drum equivalent.

The famous Lambeg drums never appear in Belfast now, but drumming matches are still popular in rural areas. The Lambeg’s origins are disputed, but it is agreed that it is the ultimate tribal symbol in Ulster. It is no accident that Lambeg drumming is strongest in Armagh, where republicanism is at its most entrenched and dangerous. The staccato beat can be heard for miles, even in bandit country.

Food

There are, in my experience, two expressions so miserable as to strike pity into the hardest heart. One is that of an Indian shopkeeper who fails to make a sale; the other, of an Ulster Protestant who has discovered his dinner will be late.

Rural Protestants in particular are people with few vices; fidelity and temperance are the norm. But they do love food. I kept track one day of the eating activities of a group of Orangemen. I had arrived in Belfast at eight o’clock and was taken to a friend’s house. The woman of the house, her daughter and daughter-in-law were preparing for the arrival at ten o’clock of three or four guests, who were being lavishly catered for despite the fact that there was no doubt that they would have had an Ulster fry two hours previously.

By the time the dignitary – the local county Grand Master – and the others arrived, the table was covered with five different kinds of sandwiches, sausages and home-made sausage rolls, home-made cakes and pies. There was orange squash, there was tea and there was coffee. And throughout the meal, as throughout so many of the meals I’ve had in Ulster, people looked at me in a worried fashion because to them my appetite seemed so small as to run the risk of my expiring at their very table from malnutrition.

Having eaten solidly, the men drove off to join their lodges and parade from their halls to the gathering point at which the main parade would begin. Those who had not had a spread like ours had the opportunity to have sandwiches or burgers before they started walking.

When the parade was over, at around two o’clock, most participants fell on the food tents in the demonstration field where ladies were raising money for various churches by selling sandwiches, cakes and tea. This kept the Orangemen going until at around six they went to their own lodge for a tea of meat and vegetables and piles of potatoes washed down with orange squash, followed by something very sweet and then by coffee and biscuits.

At lunchtime the VIPs – officers and distinguished guests – would have had a dinner in the nearest Orange hall consisting of ham and chicken and lettuce and potato salad and coleslaw and tomatoes and hard-boiled eggs and salad cream and lots of bread and plenty of something sweet to follow. My abiding memory of such dinners and teas is of ladies rushing around anxiously with food or enormous kettles, terrified lest any of their charges might be suffering from hunger or thirst for even a moment.

After all that, the non-teetotal lodges might have a nip or two of whiskey or some beer, while the drinkers in teetotal lodges might head off for a few drinks in the local pub. The serious drinkers would stay there to get plastered and the majority would go home to tea and sandwiches or biscuits before bedtime.

The Orange tooth is so sweet as to conjure up memories of one’s own childhood. I sat with a radical, intellectually aggressive, zealously evangelical minister and watched him struggle with his conscience over the issue of a second piece of apple pie, for his wife had put him on a diet. Sitting with an Orangeman who has more gravitas than almost anyone I’ve ever met, I loved seeing his hand sneaking out almost guiltily to take a chocolate biscuit.

I have a very happy memory of a visit to London by a group of Orangemen over to talk to politicians and the press about parades. Brian Kennaway, Bobby Saulters and I went for a stroll by the Thames and the Grand Master spotted an ice-cream van. As I sat beside them on a bench in the sunshine, licking an ice-cream cornet and watching the delight my companions took in that small indulgence, I remembered what one of the few defenders of Northern Ireland Orangemen had said to me over and over again: ‘They want so little. So very, very little.’

Souvenirs

In the field where a big march congregates there will be some souvenir stalls with loyal flags and red-white-and-blue hats and batons and so on, as well as tapes and T-shirts and other paraphernalia. My collection includes tea-towels – William crossing the Boyne, ‘Ulster Says No’ and a representation of the Union Jack – an apron with a crown over a Red Hand, and Drumcree-related keyrings.

At a big gathering there will be a stall or two selling various accoutrements supporting loyalist paramilitaries. In 1997 the nastiest was a T-shirt inscribed: ‘YABBA DABBA DOO ANY FENIAN WILL DO’, inspired by the LVF, whose victims had included a Catholic taxi driver who had just graduated in English Literature from Queens and an eighteen-year-old girl shot in the head as she lay in bed beside her Protestant boyfriend.

For republican kitsch, the place to go is the Sinn Féin shop on the Falls Road, where I have bought keyrings featuring Patrick Pearse, and one with the IRA slogan ‘Tiochaidh ár lá’ (‘Our day will come’) on one side and a balaclavaed chap with an Armalite on the other, as well as a tea-towel featuring the Irish flag and another with pictures of the signatories of the 1916 proclamation of the Irish Republic. I drew the line at a statue of Gerry Adams.

My favourite is the mad bigots’ stall at Scarva, manned by courteous evangelists who with the help of wares like The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, The Convent Horror, Escape from a Catholic Convent, Horrible Lives of the Popes and The Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse take one on a journey back in time.

Going home

Perhaps the best moment for me [wrote Alister Minnis, a teacher who comes home from Scotland every year for the Twelfth], is to stand watching the parade reassemble. The colour is overwhelming, the sights and sounds heady enough to sustain me until next year (or at least until Scarva). Of course, somebody who likes the sound of his own voice and has the public speaking appeal of Douglas Hogg is on the platform delaying the proceedings, but that only gives me all the more time to remember exactly who and what I am. And then the evening. To have the fellowship of our meal, to listen to the story-tellers, the singers. And later, to sit with a cool beer with my friends and family and to talk about ‘days of yore’ or ‘What will become of us?’

Drink does for some participants before they ever make it home.

One supreme recollection [wrote Rowel Friers] is of a country lodge returning from another townland where the celebrations had been hosted. When they started out they were led by His Majesty King William on a dapple-grey. William, pointing his sword defiantly heavenward, led his men to battle with an assurance worthy of d’Artagnan. Though hardly historically accurate in every detail, his uniform was acceptable to all but purists. Perhaps one could admit to a certain amount of antipathy towards his work-a-day wellies without doubt a jarring note. Nevertheless, despite any flaw in his royal raiment, his mind was fixed in the period. Proudly he led his men to glory, and if ever a leader was born, this was he.

The return journey was one of obvious triumph. Flushed from a successful day at the Field, with fresh air, good fellowship and brews, they marched homeward with chins, where possible, held high. Some had their jackets hung nonchalantly over one shoulder. Here and there a tie hung crookedly from an open shirt collar, and an odd sash had changed position – no longer de rigueur. The battle had yet again been won and William’s conquering heroes were returning. A kaleidoscope of colour – the brilliant uniforms of the bands and the glory of silken banners dancing in zigzag rhythm to the rousing music – added firmness of purpose to the multitude of boots marching muddied from the damp field. In the midst of his warriors, William sat astride his trusty, but now bored, steed. He had dropped back from the lead he held on the outward journey and was showing obvious symptoms of bottle fatigue. His hat sat at a rakish angle on a wig, now worn peek-a-boo style, and with sword pointing earthwards Billy drooped forward, nose almost buried in the horse’s mane. A loyal brother on either side of the mount kept steadying hands on His Majesty, thus ensuring that he remained, if not upright, at least mounted. The Prince of Orange had revelled in the bottle, but now neither the papist James nor anything else troubled his happy mind. His Majesty’s immortal memory had deserted him, and 1690 to him could just as well have been a phone number.

The historian David Hume is attached to a more sober lodge: ‘And then, after the Field and the return parade, they will march back along that country road, wearier this time around, and the band will play a hymn and the National Anthem after they have all lined up outside the hall. And someone will look around at someone else and as sure as anything, say, “Well, that’s the Twelfth over for another year.” ‘

‘How did you get over the Twelfth?’ is what his sister asks a Belfast friend of mine every year. As Catholic children in largely loyalist East Belfast, in the 1950s and ‘60s they spent every Twelfth in a house with the blinds down, listening to aggressive drumming sounds and fearful of violence when loyalists got drunk. ‘I’ve no difficulty believing that most Orangemen are OK,’ observed the apolitical and non-sectarian Eamonn. ‘But when you’re being beaten up, it’s hard to care whether it’s by Orangemen, bandsmen or just thuggish hangers-on. It hurts just as much.’

It was around that time that the public servant Maurice Hayes, though Catholic a fan of the Twelfth,

began to sense from Catholics in other areas that they saw the marching as a threat, a means of putting them in their place, of letting them know who was boss and that they were in a minority in a society ruled by Protestants and they had better know it and behave themselves. There was annoyance too at the sheer number of marches which kept people in houses, blocked roads, business interfered with, and the further aggravation of party tunes and some ‘kick-the-pope’ bands which insisted on playing more loudly when passing churches or chapels and the menacing beat of the Lambeg drums.

I wondered to myself why people wanted to march at all, and why others who were annoyed could not just pull down the blinds and refuse to be annoyed?

Hayes’s hope for the future is that of all sane people in Northern Ireland: that Orangemen will make more effort to explain themselves to their neighbours and that Catholics will try to understand that Orangeism is a celebration of civil and religious liberty. ‘We should be able to hold on to and to encourage the exercise of a tradition which is not only important to many people, and therefore to the rest of us, but which could add to the colour and meaning of life for all.’

It will be necessary, too, for both sides to deal with the thugs that do awful things in their name.

* With the exception of William Bingham, George Chittick and Worshipful Master Charlton, whom I interviewed, and Neil Jarman, Elaine McClure and John Moulden, who appeared on a radio programme, the quotes from everyone else named in this chapter come from their contributions to The Twelfth: What It Means to Me (ed. Gordon Lucy and Elaine McClure).

* Giving children pretend collarettes or lending them proper ones is common. Although Orangemen take their regalia seriously, they do not give it mystical status. I was watching a parade one day when I was summoned into it by Chris McGimpsey, who removed his bowler, placed it on my head and said: ‘That’s a thank you for taking the trouble to find out about us.’ I wore it slightly uneasily, afraid of giving offence, but when I consulted the Worshipful Master of my unofficial lodge he explained that no one would mind. Further, he told me that if I wanted a collarette as a souvenir, he would provide me with one. He duly sent one to me along with a miniature of Bushmills to toast it with.

4
The Family Abroad

A loyal band of Orangemen from Ulster’s lovely land,

They could not march upon the Twelfth – processions were all banned,

So they flew off to the Middle East this dreadful law to dodge

And they founded in Jerusalem the Arab Orange Lodge.

Big Ali Bey who charmed the snakes he was the first recruit

John James McKeag from Portglenone taught him to play the flute

And as the oul’ Pied Piper was once followed by the rats

There followed Ali from the lodge ten snakes in bowler hats.

They made a martial picture as they marched along the shore

It stirred the blood when Ali played “The Fez my Father Wore’.

And Yussef Ben Mohammad hit the ‘Lambeg’ such a bash

He scared the living daylights from a camel in a sash.

Now the movement spread both far and wide – there were lodges by the score

The ‘Jerusalem Purple Heroes’ was the first of many more

The ‘Loyal Sons of Djeddah’ and ‘The Mecca Shining Star’

And the ‘Rising Sons of Jericho’ who came by motor car.

The banners too were wonderful and some would make you smile

King Billy on his camel as he splashed across the Nile

But the Tyre and Sidon Temperance had the best one of them all

For they had a lovely picture of Damascus Orange Hall.

The Apprentice boys of Amman marched beneath the blazing sun

The Royal Black Preceptory were Negroes every one

And lodges came from Egypt, from the Abu Simbel Falls

And they shouted ‘No Surrender’ and ‘We’ll guard old Cairo’s walls’.

But when the ban was lifted and the lodges marched at last

The Arabs all decided to march right through Belfast

And they caused a lot of trouble before they got afloat

For they could not get their camels on the bloody Heysham boat.

Now camels choked up Liverpool and camels blocked Stranraer

And the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi came in a bloody great big car

But the ‘Easter Magic’ LOL they worked a crafty move

They used their magic carpets and flew in to Aldergrove.

When they came to Castle Junction where once stood the wee Kiosk

They dug up Royal Avenue to build a giant mosque

And Devlin says to Gerry Fitt,* ‘I think we’d better go,

There’s half a million camels coming down from Sandy Row.’

The speeches at the ‘field’ that day were really something new

For some were made in Arabic and some were in Hebrew

But just as Colonel Gaddafi got up to sing ‘The Queen’

I woke up in my bed at home and found it was a dream.

‘The Arab Orange Lodge’ (Sung to the air: ‘The Wearing of the Green’)

‘THERE’S A BOND THAT ties us together – something that folk have never fully understood,’ said Martin Smyth, who in his time as Imperial Grand Master and Imperial Grand President has travelled to all parts of Orangedom. ‘One could go to any part of the world and find a relationship immediately. Oh, yes, like any other family, they’ll be cantankerous; there’ll be folk you might love, but you couldn’t like. But it’s a family of nations and it’s fascinating.’

In 1997, the Irish Grand Lodge invited me to the social functions of the Triennial Imperial Council of the World† which, luckily for me, was that year meeting in Northern Ireland. Established in 1867, the Council has met thirty-nine times at various locations in the strongest Orange countries: Ireland, Scotland, England, Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand. In 1997 it was attended by representatives from those countries as well as from Ghana. There was sadness that because of the illness of Emenyo Mawule K. Aboki Essien, the dominating figure in Togo Orangeism as well as Imperial Grand President, there would be no delegates from his country, for it is there the custom that you do not leave someone who might die in your absence. Essien was well-known to many delegates, having visited almost every Orange jurisdiction in his time.

‘He is a remarkable character,’ observed Martin Smyth to me later, ‘with a remarkable fluency in French, which would have been the language of his area, as well as his native language and English. He and his people have an outward approach that I would like to see more of among our Orange people in Northern Ireland.

‘Where we tend to be fatalistic, the Togo Orangemen [who have only a thousand or so members] say: “There are many hundreds of thousands out there who qualify for membership. We’ve got to reach them.” So they’re going out to actually work among the people and they’ve built up a fairly strong social concern as well, which is why the Grand Lodge of Ireland provided them with a minibus, which allows them not just to transport people to meetings but also to go out into different areas of the country with some social work and evangelistic work with the churches.’

It was not the best timing for a Northern Ireland meeting of the Council. Some delegates had arrived early for holidays or to take part in the Rossnowlagh parade and therefore had been in Northern Ireland through the Drumcree build-up as well as the ensuing riots, and had been fending off phone-calls from home. ‘Drumcree was reported in the American press,’ said the wife of an American delegate, ‘and of course they only saw the violence. So my daughter called up and she was very worried and she thought the whole world was going up in smoke over here and the whole country was at war. We’re fine. We know things have happened, but we haven’t been around it. And of course the people here wouldn’t have us going to places that were at all dangerous.’

‘The media show only the bad side,’ said an Australian delegate. ‘My wife was panic-stricken. “Tell me you’re not there,” she said, meaning Drumcree. “No,” I said, “the only thing we disturbed this morning when we paraded to church was about half-a-dozen cows and a few crows that flew out of a tree as we went past.” ’

However, spirits were generally high. For many of the foreign delegates, to parade in Northern Ireland on the Twelfth and Thirteenth was the achievement of a life-long ambition. ‘It was a thrill for me,’ said the Australian Grand Secretary. ‘Something I always wanted to do. People cheering and waving reminded me of the days when I was a very young member in Sydney and people used to line the streets and wave the Union Jack as well as the Aussie flag and cheer. I felt a little emotional a couple of times.’

He was especially emotional because he had been the one to stop the processing in New South Wales. ‘I felt old men were marching when they shouldn’t have been and shared the feelings with a few others that we didn’t want it on our conscience that someone would collapse in the middle of the parade because they felt they had to march. When I stood up and announced it at the lodge I was visiting, the deputy master cried “Shame, shame”. It was a sad and tough decision: there was a long period of silence before someone had to get up and move the inevitable. It was like someone moving to close a lodge. No one wants to have their name down that they moved the motion to close the lodge.’ Although there were a few areas showing signs of revival, numbers were down to around one thousand and Victoria was now the only Australian state left with a young enough and large enough Orange population to make a parade viable.

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