Orangemen
Today, the streets of Derry are filled with marching Unionists. I took part in this march once. However, this was by accident, and I wasn't marching, I was running like hell.
In August 1986, I was on a train from Belfast to Derry, with two English hippy student friends. (I wasn't of the hippy persuasion - I saw, and still see, too much to oppose - but I felt comfortable with their spectacular indifference to being on time for anything.) They had no clue about the conflict in the North, apart from concluding, vaguely, in the English fashion, that the Irish were "all mad, yeah".
For once, we had purchased tickets, and we felt aggrieved that no conductor bothered to appear to punch them. We also wondered were we on some kind of ghost train. There wasn't another passenger on board.
We soon found out why. At Ballymena, and again at Ballmoney, the train started to fill up.
With Orangemen.
Strictly speaking, they weren't Orangemen - they were Apprentice Boys, an association, limited to male Protestants, set up in 1814 to commerate the lifting of the Siege of Derry. However, to any outsider, the public rituals were similar.
I felt like a black man who had stumbled into a Ku Klux Klan rally. Like them, I too was white, but I felt far from safe. The middle class Boys, resplendent in their stiff serge suits, colourful collar sashes and regulation hard hats, occupied the first carriage in stiff-lipped silence. The working class Boys who made up the majority of the loyal crowd poured into every other seat in the train, whooping, belching, pausing only to glance in occasional incomprehension at the two long-haired types with the spliffs and one with the mohican in the corner of one carriage.
After some high-speed beer swilling, followed by about ten minutes of good-humoured vandalism (a classic moment was seeing what seemed to be toilet fittings being used to smash windows before they were flung out through them - this struck me as mad, seeing that their need for such necessary utensils was undoubtedly greater, given the rate at which the Harp lager was being downed), they promptly started to beat the tar out of each other, for fun, between raucous deliveries of their favourite song (sung to the air of "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain"):
"If you hate the Fenian bastards, clap your hands!
If you hate the Fenian bastards, clap your hands!
If you hate the Fenian bastards, hate the DIRTY FENIAN BASTARDS,
If you hate the Fenian bastards, CLAP YOUR HANDS!"
OK, not much of a song, but you've never heard something delivered with so much enthusiasm and wild cheering. An annual catharsis from the strain of pretending to be reasonable. We didn't clap our hands; and we tried to make ourselves invisible.
My two English friends were fascinated. I explained that the Boys were British, like they were; and that they were travelling to a "cultural" event. However, I felt obliged to point out that the state of their being hippies probably cancelled out their Britishness in the eyes of the average Apprentice Boy, and that, all things considered, they were as likely to have their features re-arranged as I was.
At the next station, we decided to make a run for it; to extricate ourselves from our central position - we were surrounded by a mob on both sides - and to de-camp to the carriage nearest the guard's van.
Drunk as they were, they had us figured. As we tried to walk casually down the carriage, one of them shouted: "he's not one of us - he's not looking at us with his eyes". That was the cue for a mad thrash-up, as every Apprentice Boy within range swung at us. It was almost fun, in a chaotic way - a passing out parade of fists and kicks. When you're a teenager, you believe you'll survive anything. Fortunately, there were so many of them that they got in each other's way, and, to be fair, the blows struck were struck half in jest, if that doesn't sound daft. We barged our way to the door. Two of us tried to hold off the loons while one of us struggled with the door. We jumped out while the train was still moving; ran along the platform and climbed back in to the carriage full of the hard-hatted brigade. I had primed one of the English dudes to put on his best Home Counties accent and ask for asylum in the posh carriage, as the rest of the train was "rowdy".
I stress that at no time were we in serious danger. If the mob had wanted to hospitalise us, there was little that we could have done to prevent them. Fortunately for us, they were in good humour and they were content that they got in a few warning thumps at us as we made our way though them. That said, the situation was tense; and there was an ugly under-current to it. We couldn't entirely discount the possibility that things would escalate if I had to prove my identity.
When we reached Derry, we were literally hanging out the door, ready to jump and run. As luck would have it, there were several hundred more of them waiting, baying, at the exit from the station. As we tried, in vain, to blend in, our pursuers yelled to the waiting mob that we were "Fenians" and that we had to be "got". We legged it and didn't stop running until we had reached the relative sanctuary of the Strabane road. Moving carefully, we skulked our way back to the bus station, only to find it deserted. All the shops and cafés were closed and shuttered. Apart from a few stray dogs and a few police and army patrols, Derry was a ghost town. Clearly, the mainly Nationalist inhabitants had either barricaded themselves in or had hopped over the border to the sanity of nearby Donegal. As we stood debating whether to stand in a bus shelter and hope they wouldn't find us, break in somewhere dry (it was pissing rain) or sneak back to the Omagh road and hitch, the local police, the RUC, puzzled by our demeanour and presence, roared up beside us in their grey Land Rover Tangi and questioned us. We kept explaining that we were students and that we were lost. Again, my friends’ English accents helped, and they turfed us out, suddenly bored with three silly students.
The three things that stand out in my mind are:
- the toilet going out the window
- the red-faced guy yelling "he's not one of us - he's not looking at us with his eyes"
- the BBC news the following day, reporting on the marches with contrived heartiness, using words like the "large and peaceful turnout of the Loyal Orders in Londonderry".
- the red-faced guy yelling "he's not one of us - he's not looking at us with his eyes"
- the BBC news the following day, reporting on the marches with contrived heartiness, using words like the "large and peaceful turnout of the Loyal Orders in Londonderry".
However, whilst Orangeism has always had the potential for a cultural / historical significance, for as far back as I can remember, that has never been its effective, lead raison d'etre. Orangeism talks of culture. In reality, it has been a magnet for a vociferous minority of intolerant yobs.
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| K.A.T. - Kill All Taigs. Sign at the end of the M1, entering Belfast (2017) |
There have always been many decent people in the Orange Order (quiet neighbouring farmers where I grew up), but they generally failed to steer the Order away from its long downward spiral into mindless bigotry. The whole point of a gang of yobs marching through a Nationalist area bashing huge drums is to piss off the Fenians. Much of the debate about the annual standoff at Drumcree fails to appreciate that, for an Orangeman, marching is rooted in triumphalism. If you're marching with Fenian consent in a civilised way - I mean, c'mon, to a true Orangeman, where's the fun in that? You might as well tell a joy rider to find fulfilment in a set of advanced driving lessons. The essence of Orangeism is that you owned the North and you did what you damn well pleased. You were, after all, a conqueror:
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| Sons of Conquerors |
Entering into dialogue with Fenians was not on the agenda. For years, we used to marvel at how, every year during the Orange marching season, our ordinarily friendly Orange neighbours would suddenly stop speaking to / looking at us - during the marching season, if out with his mates, a true Orangeman would be embarrassed to be seen to be too familiar with a Nationalist. As per the Heaney poem, "The Nod":
The Nod
Saturday evenings we would stand in line
In Loudan's butcher shop. Red beef, white string,
Brown paper ripped straight off for parcelling
Along the counter edge. Rib roast and shin
Plonked down, wrapped up, and bow-tied neat and clean
But seeping blood. Like dead weight in a sling,
Heavier far than I had been expecting
While my father shelled out for it, coin by coin.
Saturday evenings too the local B-Men,
Unbuttoned but on duty, thronged the town,
Neighbours with guns, parading up and down,
Some nodding at my father almost past him
As if deliberately they'd aimed and missed him
Or couldn't seem to place him, not just then.
- Seamus Heaney
However, Orangeism, in its self-pitying public view of itself, prefers to spin itself as an expression of British culture. This is transparent hogwash. In reality, Orangeism was a cynical Capitalist invention, in the classic divide and conquer mould. Andrew Flood notes how:
The strategy was simple. In order to prevent Protestant workers identifying with their Catholic neighbours the order offered an anti-Catholic society, led by the wealthy Protestants that offered all Protestants a place in its ranks, and the promise of promotion and privilege. The annual parades were a key part of this strategy, they filled two roles. They allowed the working class Protestant members a day in the sun to mix with their 'betters' and at the same time lord it over their Catholic neighbours.
Flood goes on to point out that Orangeism has always been associated with racist thuggery. The overwhelming success of generations of establishment anti-dissenter, anti-insurgent propaganda in Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, the U.S. etc. means that most decent people in those countries assume that the IRA started the conflict in the late 1960s. Flood reminds us that this kindergarten, history-light version of events omits a few salient details:
Right from the start the parades have been accompanied by violence as they attempt to force their way through areas where they are not wanted. The first parades of 1796 saw one fatality, but in 1797 14 were killed during violence at an Orange parade in Stewartstown. In 1813 an Orange parade through one of the first areas of Belfast identified as 'Catholic' saw four more deaths.
The town of Portadown has long been a hot bed of 'contentious' parades, banned marches took place there in 1825 and 1827. In 1835 the Portadown marches claimed their first victim, Hugh Donnelly, a Catholic from Drumcree. Armagh Magistrate, William Hancock, (a Protestant), said:
"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 ... a body of Orangemen marched through the town and proceeded to Drumcree church, passing by the Catholic chapel though it was a considerable distance out of their way."
Read Flood's article here. Culture? You decide. Sure, the Boys' march will have passed off peacefully; but that's because most everyone else, even the train conductors, will already have fled.
