If you visit the Orange Order’s Belfast headquarters, you can buy all sorts of endearing kitsch. There are postcards with Santa Claus wearing Orange regalia, Orange Mr Men figures, reproduction Williamite coins and jars of Orange marmalade with King Billy and his white horse on the label.
That’s the folksy side of the order — it’s funny and a little bit outrageous.
Another side is more serious. The order proclaims itself “primarily a religious organisation”, which is “Christ-centred, Bible-based, and Church-grounded”. It preaches sobriety and rectitude to its members, and stands for civil and religious liberty. But it slips into questionable territory with the requirement that its members must sign a declaration before joining that both their parents are Protestants, and leave if they marry a Catholic.
Nestling in among the merchandise at the House of Orange in Belfast is a special “diamond” or medal sold at £20 to be hung on collarettes to commemorate one of the most significant pieces of sectarian mayhem the order had ever engaged in: the Battle of Dolly’s Brae.
Dolly’s Brae was an almost entirely Catholic village near Castlewellan in Co Down, which the order determined to walk through for the first time in 1849. Police and dragoons lined the route and allowed them to pass, seeing it as the option least likely to cause trouble. The marchers, many of them armed, took advantage of the occasion to sing anti-Catholic songs, with the result that a Catholic paramilitary gang, the Ribbonmen, decided to contest their journey on the way back.
After the demonstration Lord Roden took the Orange marchers to his estate, gave them whiskey, incited them to fight and agreed to lead them on the return leg. In the ensuing mêlée 30 Ribbonmen were killed. There is no mention of Orange fatalities. As a result, Orange marches were banned from 1850 until 1872, and Roden was forced to stand down as a justice of the peace.
In the cold light of day, the Battle of Dolly’s Brae must be seen as one of the most disastrous episodes in the order’s history. It alienated it from the state to which it was supposed to be loyal and all but led to it being formally suppressed as it had been in 1825. Today Dolly’s Brae is celebrated as an Orange victory. Songs are sung about it, the anniversary is commemorated and Orange Brethren carry banners eulogising the day they pushed a march through against determined opposition and killed 30 people who tried to stand in their way.
These are the only sort of victories the order has to celebrate. On the big historical issues it has fought a largely unsuccessful rearguard battle and, its founding myths are little more than wishful thinking. King William III, whose victory at the Boyne it celebrates, probably could not have joined the order because he was allied to the Pope. His principles of civil and religious liberty were adopted by the order, but when the decisive test of Catholic emancipation came up, it campaigned for the retention of the penal laws. Today the House of Orange in Holland, from which they derive their name and which honours him to this day, want no more to do with them than they do to the British royal family.
Of course that is not the whole of the Orange story. The order has provided a men’s club in many areas, it has held scattered Protestant communities together, extended mutual help to its members and its tunes have contributed a great deal to Ireland’s musical heritage. Its bands have nurtured musical talents and its halls have been cheap and convenient meeting places for everything from youth clubs to dog-training classes. It has helped thousands of people in its history and many Orangemen have been good neighbours and friends to Catholics.
My own grandfather, who played in an Orange band in Co Monaghan, is remembered there for aiding a revival of Irish piping in the area in the 1920s and the 1930s, and had friends across the community divide.
Many Orangemen today are decent and upstanding men who pay as little attention as they can to the sectarian antecedents of the order and seek to experience it as a purely religious and fraternal body.
They point to the qualifications of an Orangeman, which members must assent to before joining, as evidence of the order’s basic decency. They enjoin members to be “gentle and compassionate, kind and courteous”. The qualifications say he should “seek a society of the virtuous, and avoid that of the evil” and “abstain from all uncharitable words, actions or sentiments towards his Roman Catholic brethren”, even while refusing to countenance “ by his presence or otherwise any act of ceremony of Popish worship”.
Many hold these principles as an ideal, but the aspiration to avoid the company “of the evil” was honoured in the breach at Whiterock, when men in collarettes stood shoulder to shoulder with masked paramilitaries. Both before and after last weekend’s march, gentleness, compassion and courtesy were in short supply as Orange leaders pronounced themselves free of all blame for the violence and hit out at the police.
The truth is that enough of Orange history is in the Dolly’s Brae mode — violent, sectarian and triumphalist — to stop the celebration of Orange culture from being a simple and straightforward matter in the 21st century.
Any examination of the role of the Orange Order must start with a frank admission that it has its origins in paramilitarism and that it has never succeeded in freeing itself of that taint. It evolved from the Peep o Day boys, the main loyalist players in the sectarian faction fights of the 1790s, and it has never entirely exorcised the raw passions of that violent era. Indeed the order and its sanctification of a sectarian past has been one of the main vehicles for transmitting those deadly rivalries to each new century since then.
Loyalist killers are still embraced by sections of Orangeism. To take one example, each year Old Boyne Island Heroes LOL 633 in Belfast lays a wreath at a plaque in honour of one its members. He is Brian Robinson, a UVF man who was shot dead by a British Army undercover unit minutes after he had himself murdered a Catholic, Patrick McKenna, in Ardoyne. When the lodge was questioned, it said of Robinson, “His private life was his own affair”.
It isn’t a small event. Each year up to 40 bands take part, and in 2000, Dawson Bailie defended it in a BBC interview by describing the Orange Order as “a broad church”. Broad enough, it seems, to include people who murder Catholics, but not those who marry them.
Bailie went on to say that, he had “no axe to grind whatsoever” with those who took part in the parade in memory of Robinson.
This is the same Dawson Bailie who, this year, called for unionists to take to the streets before the disputed march and then inflamed them with talk of an “attempt to humiliate and suppress our culture”. Afterwards he refused to accept responsibility for what had occurred, saying: “As far as I’m concerned the people to blame for that (the violence) are the secretary of state, the chief constable and the Parades Commission, fairly and squarely.”
Bailie was later satirised in an e-mail that circulated among some disgruntled Orangemen. It read: “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no sense.”
His leadership has been poor, but if the Orange Order is to have a long-term future it needs to do more than change its top table. It must stop exalting its own worst excesses and re-invent itself as a cultural organisation free of the taint of sectarian triumphalism.
