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