* 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.
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.