MAKE MINE AN ORANGE, PLEASE
Ruth Dudley Edwards explains why, despite
being a Catholic, she admires the Ulster marchers
`EVEN if King Billy himself told the Por- tadown Orangemen they wouldn't get down the Garvaghy Road,' observed a senior Orangeman gloomily to me last week, 'they wouldn't believe him.' And they'd shoot his horse,' added his Orange companion.
We were sitting in a Chinese restaurant, racking our brains to think of any way out of the annual Drumcree fiasco. 'You're going to get an awful press again,' said the fourth of our party. 'The home counties already think you're blockheaded bigots.' `We are blockheaded bigots,' said the first Orangeman, and the other one nodded.
Those two aren't, as it happens, and nei- ther are many of their brethren, though quite a few of them are bigots, and when it comes to public relations at least — a majority of them are blockheads. But then, in Northern Ireland almost everyone is a bigot. As an Orangeman rightly remarked to me in my early anthropologi- cal explorations into the loyal institutions, `We're all bigots in Northern Ireland. What's more, the worst bigots are those who won't admit it.'
Protestant cultural antipathy to dissimu- lation and hypocrisy renders them almost congenitally incapable of playing to the public gallery. This is one of the reasons why I, born and brought up Catholic in the Irish Republic, have come to like the Ulster Protestant tribe so much. Apart from their manifold other virtues, most of them admit to their failings — something the Irish Catholics rarely do. In fact it's a fair rule of thumb that the average Ulster Prod is better than he seems and the aver- age Ulster Catholic worse: David Trimble You know your problem, Kevin, you keep bottling things up.' is a nicer man than John Hume.
Protestant bigotry is displayed; Catholic bigotry is hidden. Since the latest episode in the Drumcree saga began, the scum of the Protestant tribe has been flaunting itself in front of the press along the moat that the army created to keep protesters and security forces apart. My most memo- rable encounter during my Drumcree peregrinations was the fat woman in red who was screaming across the barrier at the two soldiers within earshot, `I hope you die like dogs.' Observing my facial response to this attempt to seduce the British army into mutinying in defence of the loyal people of Northern Ireland, she placed her hands on her extensive hips and enquired, `What's wrong, missus? Isn't it better I'm telling them what I think to their faces instead of behind their backs?' I did not take issue with her, for she was accompanied by a couple of tattooed chaps of the kind who beat up journalists and photographers on the grounds that they are not giving loyalists a fair press.
On the Garvaghy Road, of course, the press are feted and even the dimmest inhabitants are schooled in PC lingo. They don't hate Orangemen, they explain: they hate their triumphalism and their disre- gard for Catholic sensibilities. They hate the sin, not the sinner. And brilliantly there as throughout Northern Ireland and with the unwitting collusion of the Orangemen and their hangers-on, the vic- tims of Catholic bigotry are represented as the bigots and the bigots as the victims.
Smeared by association with the depraved loyalists who use the parades issue to kill and maim Catholics and drive them out of their homes, encumbered by bigoted clowns like Joel Patton and his Spirit of Drumcree nasties, and almost to a brother incapable of making their case, the Orange Order have become international pariahs: a friend warned me that to mount a defence of them now, in the week follow- ing the hideous murder of the three Quinn children, could destroy my credibility. But what the hell! I know dozens and dozens of Orangemen who are among the best people I have ever met. They have endured 30 years of torment from republi- can violence and now they see themselves represented through green propaganda as haters of Catholics. Yet they strive to live up to the principles of their institution and stand for civil and religious liberty and tol- erance towards all men. They are com- pletely bewildered as to why the English, of all people, don't understand their need to celebrate the Glorious Revolution which delivered them from monarchical absolutism. They are appalled by the republican demand for cultural apartheid and they cannot understand why the sight of the parades they love is intolerable to their neighbours. They watch in mute mis- ery as the television cameras show shaven- headed yobs playing the fife and drum badly and ignore the highly accomplished accordion, pipe and silver bands which are so important to the proud Ulster Protes- tant musical tradition.
The vast majority of Orangemen are lik- able, decent, humble, honest people who joined the institution for religious or social reasons. Their lodge meetings have varied little in two centuries: they read the Bible, discuss their finances, worry about the roof, plan the modest festivities for the Twelfth and — in the country — fret about the weather and the price of beef. Their tastes are simple, their habits frugal and their religion devoid of smells and bells: Orangeism provides some spice and colour in their lives. More important for many is the brotherhood and the discipline, as well as the spiritual dimension. For a man like the Reverend William Bingham, who last Sunday gave a sermon that launched his campaign to save Orangeism from its worst elements, the Order is there to help its members lead a Christian life.
Last Monday, in Pomeroy, which every seven years hosts the South Tyrone Twelfth, the parade was banned from pro- ceeding a hundred yards into the village to walk around the Protestant church, lest it offend the susceptibilities of those inhabit- ing the seven Catholic houses it would pass: soldiers, police and armoured cars were there to block the march if necessary.
Pomeroy is now 97 per cent Catholic. Protestants have been pushed into a little enclave at the bottom of the village street beside the Presbyterian graveyard in which six victims of IRA terrorism are buried: the last Protestant shops closed because of a nationalist boycott. Everyone on that parade knew that the Catholics in the dis- puted territory had no objection to the parade and that the residents' group was a republican front. They knew too that bogus residents' grbups are being set up in every village and town with a Catholic majority to demand that Protestant parades be confined to Protestant areas and to set Orangemen against the security forces. They know that republicans are brilliant political strategists and that they are hopeless. They alternate between despair and defiance. They deserve more help and less condemnation.
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