Читать книгу The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions - Ruth Edwards Dudley - Страница 8

At the time I was chairman of the British Association for Irish Studies (BAIS) which, inter alia, sought to give public expression to all aspects of Irish history, politics and culture. Protestant and unionist perspectives received a decent airing at our conferences and public lectures, but we had never heard a positive view of Orangeism – a closed, unreadable and rather distasteful book to most academics. (‘For all I know about Orangemen after twenty years of living and working in Belfast,’ said an English academic friend to me recently, ‘they could live in burrows in the Glens of Antrim.’) So I thought I had better go and look at a Twelfth of July parade and see if I could understand what was going on.

Orangeism to me then represented thuggish, stupid, sectarian bigotry. I had a vague feeling that Orangemen were mainly working-class, and that aspiring unionist politicians cynically donned the Orange sash to help them get elected. People on the Anglo-Irish scene occasionally passed on the information that all unionist MPs, with the exception of Ken Maginnis, were in the Orange Order. Since Maginnis was and is a well-known liberal and one of the few unionist leaders to have friends in the Republic of Ireland, this was added evidence that Orangeism was for bigots only. It was ten years before I learned that Maginnis was in fact a member of a loyal institution with an even rougher reputation: the Apprentice Boys.

Northern nationalist friends spoke of the fear that gripped them on the Twelfth of July; middle-class Protestants and Catholics alike talked of how they always got out of town for the Twelfth and a Catholic friend from Portadown did a highly amusing imitation of an Orangeman swaggering along singing ‘On the Green Grassy Slopes of the Boyne’, with a chorus of ‘Fuck the Pope’, in which we all merrily joined.

It was sobering that no one wanted to go with me. Family and friends in London thought it another of my aberrations to want to look at a lot of dreary and possibly dangerous men stomping along in bowler hats and probably rioting. And my Northern Irish friends refused out of hand, except for one Protestant with an interest in political culture who agreed to take me to a bonfire on the night before the parade. Fortunately, my Dublin friend Úna is indulgent and adventurous, so she agreed to go north.

On an impulse, when I arrived in Belfast on Friday, I looked up the Orange Order in the phone book and presented myself at the House of Orange in Dublin Road. I was making a point for the sake of it: I expected to be greeted with distrust if not hostility. Instead I was given a friendly welcome by George Patten, the executive secretary.

I explained about the BAIS and asked some basic questions about how much work had been done on Orange history. What were the chances of an outsider ever being allowed access to Orange archives? I asked idly. George Patten shook his head. He was all for objective history, he said, but he couldn’t imagine the Order trusting an outsider.

Emboldened by his friendliness, I explained that Úna and I wanted to see the parade on Monday and that, being Dublin Catholics, we didn’t know where to go or what to do. Had he any advice on where we should sit? And how would we find out what was going on? Explaining that he himself would not be in Belfast, for he would be on parade in the country, Patten summoned a colleague who told me where we would have the best view: he would come and brief us for a while in the morning preparatory to joining his lodge.

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.