Stoking the fires of prejudice
It's that time of year again, the one euphemistically known as "the marching season". The season of mayhem, provocation and triumphalism all wrapped up in an archaic orange sash. Festivities kicked off prematurely as always with the now "traditional" burning of a Catholic Church. This time it was Portadown's turn and some "cultural" exchanges with Catholic kids on a North Belfast housing estate that culminated in arson attacks on their homes.
But before Ruth Dudley Edwards cries "Foul!" as she rushes to the defence of the bowler-hatted ones, it was not actually Orangemen who were responsible for any of the above traditional events. Orangemen, of course, have no connection with the thuggish, Catholic-hating elements who so besmirch the good name of the Loyal Orange Institution of Ireland. According to the Order, the rise in sectarian tensions, the fears of Catholics, the confining of whole communities for hours on end, the curtailing of all traffic and the closure of businesses while Orangemen, kick-the-Pope bands, assorted Loyalist paramilitary regalia, a sea of Union Jacks, hundreds of tattooed, shaven-headed, knuckle-dragging, track-suited followers and their dogs traipse through your local community, village, town and city centre has absolutely no connection to the outrages perpetrated each year on individual Catholics, their homes, churches and schools. And who knows, maybe there would be no connection if it only happened once a year but 3,000 parades a year? Aren't the loyal brethren stretching the limits of our credulity even just a little?
But the parades are traditional isn't that what they say? Like the illegal one that took place in Belfast city centre in February of this year, purportedly in commemoration of two UDR men killed in the city centre in the late 1980s.
According to the Orange Order it "has a responsible attitude to parades witnessed by its own stewarding arrangements". The stewarding arrangements of Orange parades are so discreet it is difficult to find them, particularly when trouble does erupt. Even Dudley Edwards was forced to vent her frustration in the Sunday Independent in 2002, when Orangemen and their followers engaged in pitched battles with the police in Portadown while Orange Lodge and District Officers and their marshals "turned and marched smartly away to their Sunday dinners leaving ... mayhem in their wake".
Refuting those who regard the institution as "triumphalist", and "out of step with modern society", the Orange Order website lets us have it right between the eyes. We are either "bigoted moderates or bigoted republicans". And that about sums up their response to any criticism or challenge that they could be in anyway responsible for the upheaval, the chaos, the conflict, the hatred and the stoking of the fires of prejudice and supremacy. Sure, wouldn't we say that about them anyway, because we're all bigots, moderates and republicans.
Needless to say, the past 10 years of protest and challenge to Orange marches and their "right to walk the Queen's highway" (you have to love how they talk) is part of a greater, fiendish republican plot to have their cultural and religious liberties eroded. It's not like there was ever trouble at Orange Parades before, or that they had been accused of fomenting sectarian hatred in the past:
"For some time past the peaceable inhabitants of the parish of Drumcree have been insulted and outraged by large bodies of Orangemen parading the highways, playing party tunes, firing shots and using the most opprobrious epithets they could invent..."
So said Armagh magistrate, William Hancock, a Protestant, in his evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee established to investigate the Orange Order in 1835. In 1857, following serious disturbances in Belfast, the Belfast Riot Inquiry ruled that the originating causes of the riots were the 12th of July Orange parades, a "celebration" that was used " to remind one party of the triumphs of their ancestors over those of the other, and to inculcate the feelings of Protestant superiority over their Roman Catholic neighbours".
In 1886, 12th of July parades led to "probably the worst outbreak of violence that century".
In 1935 an Orange march invaded the small Catholic enclave of Lancaster Street, North Belfast with that year's marching season culminating in 514 catholic families, a total of 2,241 people, intimidated out of Protestant areas and nine people dead.
In the 1950s the Longstone Road area near Annalong, County Down, endured years of turbulence and fear as up to 12,000 Orangemen were pushed through this nationalist area, which was not a traditional route, escorted by hundreds of RUC officers.
These are "traditional" aspects of Orangeism not normally aired by its apologists. This history and its annual reenactment needs to be addressed if we are to move on from the yearly hand-wringing and hesitation that characterises political responses to the Orange marching season.