Kitabı oku: «The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions»

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Eight Parades, a Cancellation and Some Anthropological Notes from the War-zone

I CAME TO THE LOYAL institutions bringing with me all the unconscious prejudices I had imbibed during a Dublin Roman Catholic^* childhood and a secular adulthood in London. The best way of explaining how my views have changed is to give my own parading history; so here is a cross-section of the dozens of parades, big and small, that I have attended. I have tried to show how my assumptions and attitudes changed along the way, so where I wrote at the time about a parade, I quote relevant extracts here.

1. Belfast, 13 July 1987

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.

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 love the taxis. They arrived at infrequent intervals, decorated according to the enthusiasm of the proprietor with anything from a single Union Jack to full regalia – King Billy banners, large flags, bunting and a multiplicity of political flowers. Their purpose was threefold: to transport Orangemen too old or frail to march with their lodges, drums too heavy for anyone to carry for five miles and also to pick up those who faltered along the route. I loved the moment when a dogged aged marcher dropped out, still smiling bravely, hailed an oncoming taxi uncertainly and was eventually assisted by a functionary who stopped the cab and the entire procession and helped him in. The fact that such a disciplined parade would stop unexpectedly to accommodate a falterer was typical of the humanity of the whole event. There was even a wheelchair.

I love the daft mix of clothes. From the ultra-disciplined – flute bands in vulgar brightly-coloured uniforms which depending on your perception were quasi-military, ocean-liner steward or cinema usher, complete with little caps with tassels, epaulettes and the lot – through kilts, trews, tam o’shanters, Californian drum majorettes’ uniforms, complete with short skirts, white socks and white shoes, older women in sensible skirts and stout shoes, chaps with ponytails, chaps in shirt-sleeves, one man in a dinner-jacket, to the most familiar image – the men in suits and bowlers with the sashes. There were people carrying pikes, staves, batons, drums, pipes, flutes, tin whistles and umbrellas. Then there were the kids who ranged from five-year-olds of both sexes in full uniform at the head of a lodge to various tracksuited individuals or toddlers in dresses and waterproof jackets holding on to banner-cords. A few people had their faces painted red, white and blue; several others opted for coloured hair, which in a surprising number of instances ended up green.

I love the lack of ageism. The fact that, apparently unselfconsciously, lodges could accommodate marchers from toddlers to totterers.

I love the fact that they are terrifically disciplined for the first mile or so, while the TV cameras are on them; in fact, when they catch sight of them, there is extra special twirling of batons, straighter shoulders and even more histrionics on the drums.

I love the signs of fraying of tempers when they got to the third mile and were soaked through. In one accordion band the girls got stroppy with their male leaders and a full-scale rebellion about what was to be played next had to be resolved. In mixed bands like this you could especially see the social importance of the Orange Order. Joining the Sandy Row Prince of Orange Accordion Band must be the local equivalent of joining the Young Conservatives in Surrey.

I love the fact that there was much chatting with the crowd once the heat was off, that people like us were intent on locating those we knew and shouting and waving at them – it was an important form of recognition. We swelled with pride when we spotted a McGimpsey and received a wave.

I love their dogged varieties of stoicism in the face of the cruel weather. Some sported umbrellas; accordion-players perforce had to wear plastic cloaks to protect their instruments; other defiantly wore shirt-sleeves in downpours that had my contingent whingeing and fighting over our golf umbrella. Not only did they finish the march, but most of them stayed in Edenderry, with little to amuse but hamburger and fish-and-chip stalls, and a platform of dignitaries. When we left, the officiating clergyman had attracted an audience of only about thirty-five. Everyone else was hanging around hoping that the rain would stop, the mud would dry up and they could do what they normally did – sit on the grass, play music, drink beer and sing, until it was time to regroup and march back the five miles to Belfast city centre.

I love marching along with the parade, which we did after an hour or so in order to get warm. My choice was the Unthank Road Flute Band. And when you get into the rhythm, you understand the importance of military music.

Priscilla and Emily enjoyed themselves in the same way as I did, but Bridget and Gus did not. Bridget hates parades anyway and, like Gus, thought this one militaristic. Neither likes fife-and-drum music. There was some wistful longing for Spanish fiestas or West Indian carnivals. Priscilla caused a rethink by pointing out that this event was greatly similar to the Ancient Order of Hibernians’ St Patrick’s Day parade in New York, with the pipe bands, the IRA veterans and the marching Irish police in Sam Browne belts. It was agreed that because the South was unused to military trappings, it was possible to see militarism where it was not intended. What received general agreement in the end was that the parade was an expression of pride in the community and that is no bad thing.

Tiny signs of tribalism were accentuated by walking down the Falls and the Shankill. The very secular Priscilla suddenly went seriously Protestant in the Shankill Road. Here, she said, were the besieged, not the besiegers; it was a clenched-teeth community. It was a reversion to family type. ‘If there have been Catholics in the family, it has never been mentioned,’ she explained.

Bridget and Emily went slightly the other way, mainly because of their shock at the World Cup-related graffiti. Having been actively involved in World Cup mania in Dublin and having adored the carnival atmosphere, it passed their understanding that anyone in Northern Ireland would not have been on the side of the Ireland team. The comments on the Ireland-Holland match were bad enough: 1690 ORANGEMEN 1–0; 1994 ORANGEMEN 2–0’; ‘PACKIE BUTTERFINGERS LET IT IN THE NET’. ‘But we’d have supported Northern Ireland if they’d got through,’ said the Houricans. ‘Not the point,’ said the newly politicized Priscilla. ‘Being besieged leads to aggression.’ And that was before we saw the comment on the Ireland – Italy match and the Loghlinisland public-house massacre: ‘HOUGHTON HIT THE NET 1–0; UVF HIT THE BAR 6–0’.

Gus felt no tribal signals. He felt more at ease in the Falls simply because there a southern accent would be an advantage, but he was depressed by both roads and the multiplicity of ‘For Sale’ signs, suggesting hopeless attempts to get out.

Everyone loved the people they met from both communities and their great friendliness and were delighted when a Protestant taxi-driver said with pleasure, ‘I wouldn’t have expected youse people from Dublin to come up and wave on the parade.’ Bridget was particularly pleased at the elderly Orangemen who said to her in the field, ‘Wish you were the leader of my lodge.’

A detour on the way home via Crossmaglen yielded an impressive tribute to the British passion for freedom of speech, for signs which I had seen a year ago were still in place: ‘BRITISH TERRORISTS GO HOME’ and, surrounding a sketch of a chap in a balaclava, ‘2ND BATTALION – VICTORY TO THE PROVOS’.

Priscilla has returned to America determined to recommend the event to her Irish acquaintances, and the Dublin contingent is evangelical. A coachload can be expected next year.

3. Aughnacloy, 23 August 1995

As a result of that and other articles about Northern Ireland, I received an invitation out of the blue from a County Tyrone farmer the following year to come to the Clogher Valley, stay at his house and attend ‘the Last Saturday in August demonstration with RBP No. 800’. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I was so stunned at being invited to anything by an unknown Ulster Protestant that I cut short a highly convivial holiday in Clare. ‘I’m going to some kind of Orange march in the country,’ I said to a Southern Irish friend who worked for peace and reconcilation in Northern Ireland. ‘You must be mad,’ she said. ‘I’d rather cut my throat than go to an Orange march.’

Henry, my host, had decided that it was time – post-Drumcree One – for at least one journalist to attend an ordinary rural parade as a guest of what turned out to be a preceptory of the Royal Black Institution. Determined I should see it for myself and make up my own mind about it, he gave me little briefing the night before. At around nine the following morning, after his mother had provided us with a vast Ulster fry,^* we drove to the little village of Clogher, six miles from the border. It was cold and intermittently showery: Ulster’s is a cruel climate for a culture whose big festival days occur in the open air.

I was led first into the Orange Hall which was shared by what I now knew to be the Royal Black Preceptory and Henry showed me around. A two-storey house, it was dingy, plain and furnished in a decidedly spartan fashion with hard seats and rough trestle-tables. There was a picture of the Queen downstairs and another upstairs, a ceremonial sword and a plush seat for the Worshipful Master. The lavatory and kitchen were tiny and cheerless and there was no hot water. Men rushed in and out exchanging greetings, removing coats and putting on what I thought were black sashes but which are called collarettes, bowler hats and white gloves. The Blackmen,^† as they are generally known, pride themselves on being well turned out: indeed, the only daft thing that Henry has ever said to me he said later that day. When he observed on parade a contingent from south of the border who were wanting in the white-glove department, he shook his head and said, ‘Look at them poor craturs there. If we’d been in a United Ireland we’d all be in that state.’

After introducing me to some of his brethren, Henry dispatched me with instructions to wait across the road from the hall, watch them parade round the village and then proceed to the coach to travel to the main parade. Then they assembled, their band struck up and they processed up the village and round and down, watched by no more than perhaps a dozen or so people along the way.

In the coach I was seated next to the Worshipful Master who said he hoped I would come to tea in the hall afterwards and suggested that if I enjoyed a nip of whiskey, I might like to accompany him to the pub afterwards. My enthusiasm for this notion sealed our friendship, and for the rest of the journey we talked about his family. (Ulster people are so cautious of causing affront by seeming nosy that they rarely ask personal questions; during interviews on countless occasions someone would say in response to a question about his religion, ‘I don’t know what your faith is and I wouldn’t ask but I hope I’m not giving offence,’ before going on to say something completely innocuous about his particular religious beliefs.)

Summing up the day in a newspaper article, I wrote:

The Clogher Valley people – who were extraordinarily welcoming – have since been described to me as among the most decent people in Northern Ireland. Dungannon, the local council, is working well on a system of power-sharing between the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP. As one council member explained: ‘For most purposes it’s us and the SDLP [John Hume’s party] against the fascists – the DUP [Ian Paisley’s party] and Sinn Féin.’^* And there were many Catholics among the more than 20,000 people who picnicked in cars along the parade route.^†

You can’t become an RBP member without having spent two years in the Orange Order. The RBP has a reputation for being the least confrontational of loyal institutions, so I realize that what I saw in Aughnacloy was the most benign face of Orangeism. Of perhaps 90 lodges and bands, only three or four were even faintly intimidating. The exceptions were what are known as the ‘kick-the-pope’^* bands of young men from places like Portadown with earrings, shaven heads, vulgar and militaristic uniforms and a triumphalist swagger; in Scotland they would be on the terraces of Glasgow Rangers football club.

I’ve often vaguely wondered exactly what Orangemen do. ‘Sinn Féin think we talk politics and plot,’ said one RBP member. ‘In fact what we do is to have a monthly meeting in our hall to discuss trivial points about increasing the annual dues or repairing the roof; a few times a year we have a dinner. The main reason for going is just to meet your neighbours. And the parades are days out to look forward to.’

It was with a shock of recognition that I realized that, at bottom, the Orange Order is simply a Northern Irish Protestant means of male bonding. In England chaps have their clubs in which they obey arcane rules and organize social occasions. Some are Freemasons – cousins of Orangemen – and wear funny clothes and appear to be sinister because they conduct their proceedings in secret, but are in fact by and large a pretty harmless lot of men who just want an excuse to get out of the house. Irish Catholic men bond in pubs.^†

Clogher Valley Protestants are hard-working, God-fearing, sober, frugal but warm people with a fierce pride in the land which many generations of their forefathers made so prosperous. Their RBP headquarters has so far escaped the fate of the almost 100 Orange halls attacked and seriously damaged in the past six years. It is a simple village hall with no creature comforts. The post-parade tea, at which I was made welcome both formally and informally, was – as one of them put it – ‘a country dinner’ of lots of meat and potatoes, and it was dry. But the Worshipful Master took me to the pub afterwards for Irish whiskey and chat with locals.

RBP 800 prided themselves on being well turned-out for the parade, in best suits, bowler hats, sash, mason’s apron and white gloves; the Murley Silver Band with whom they have marched for many years has a smart uniform. Like most of the bands, the Murley men and women are devoted to music-making rather than politics and like many of the other bands has extended its repertoire far beyond ‘The Sash’ and military music; many bands now play the music of that Catholic Derryman, Phil Coulter.^*

What is missed in television coverage of these marches is the happy aspect. Old men walk along hand-in-hand with a toddler grandchild; cars follow individual lodges bearing proud but infirm elders; and every time I moved from my marching position beside the band and caught the eye of one of the men from my host lodge, I was awarded a wink or a large beam. Afterwards I said to one of them, ‘Why do you look so serious as you parade?’ He was puzzled. ‘It’s part of the discipline.’

There is a general belief that without the twenty-five years of assault from the IRA, the Orange Order would have almost withered away. The recognition that nationalist spokesmen are wiping the floor with unionists politically and on the media makes the parades a vital means of showing that the Protestants won’t go away. ‘What else have we got?’ asked one. Yet there is a new recognition of the necessity of taking on the nationalists at their own game. ‘We’ve been too stiff-necked and proud to explain ourselves,’ said one. ‘We’ve got to change.’ There is nothing they would like so much in the Clogher Valley as to watch on television the new leader of the Ulster Unionist Party wipe that smile off Gerry Adams’s face.

There were aspects of the day I had no room to put in that article. Such as that my host – who wanted me to know how bad it could be – insisted that we sit on the wet grass and listen to an evangelist who seemed to me to be completely deranged. Or that I was totally baffled that chaps speaking from the platform referred to each other as ‘Sir Knight’. I was baffled too that there was almost no reference to politics: I had a vague impression that all marches ended with a unionist politician going on about the Anglo-Irish Agreement. It was only afterwards that I discovered that the Black was concerned more with the spiritual than the political.

I didn’t mention that I discovered that it was rather fun singing hymns – this was the first of my many attempts at ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ – nor did I refer to the ‘resolutions’ that were proposed at what I had just learned was called a ‘demonstration’. Here are the three listed in the leaflet I was given, which included this instruction about a forthcoming anniversary service: ‘Sir Knights to assemble on the Augher Road beside the Filling Station at 2.45 p.m.’

FIRST RESOLUTION

In pursuit of lasting peace in our land, we stress the need to contend earnestly for the Faith: We urge all Sir Knights to continue to live in harmony with their neighbours and to do all in their power to witness to the saving truths of the everlasting Gospel. We call upon everyone to embrace the Faith once delivered to the Saints and to engage whole-heartedly in the battle against the evil forces so rampant in today’s society.

SECOND RESOLUTION

We, the Members of the Imperial Grand Black Chapter of the British Commonwealth, send our loyal greetings to Her Majesty The Queen. The commemorations of the end of the Second World War enabled the British people to manifest their deep respect for Her Majesty, who has maintained the commitment and duty to Her people as displayed throughout the war by Her Father and Mother, and confirmed their conviction that the Monarchy remains the keystone of our Parliamentary Democracy.

The third one was more foxing. But then I had not yet learned how immediate for many religiously-minded Protestants is the Old Testament.

THIRD RESOLUTION

We applaud the good citizens of Northern Ireland who remained unnerved by the shocks and uncertainties since the cessation of military operations by terrorists.

We regret that little was done to prepare the population for the inevitable confusion similar to that experienced by ancient Israel when released from captivity in Egypt. Unlike them we must remain resolute and ready to take full advantage of favourable developments before the end of the year.

I didn’t mention either, as I didn’t want to hurt Henry’s feelings, that while I understood the attraction of parades, this seemed to me a pretty weird way of enjoying yourself, interesting though I’d found the experience. Nor that living in London where I virtually never hear the national anthem, I was moved by the fervour with which those attending the service sang it at the end. Nor that I greatly enjoyed the warmth of the welcome given in the Orange Hall to a female southern Irish Catholic (albeit an atheist – which, of course, to them is worse) and was touched that the Worshipful Master thanked me formally for bothering to come. I appreciated everyone’s friendliness, liked the atmosphere in the pub and the warmth and the chat of the drinking bandsmen and women and lodge-members. And I was thrilled that RBP No. 800 was now informally my lodge.^*

4. Scarva, 13 July 1996

We’d had a very jolly Twelfth the previous day in Kesh. Despite the rise in sectarian bitterness after the events at Drumcree, there had been little to see except the parade and people enjoying themselves in the manner of rural Protestants: a sunny day, ice-cream, picnics, soft drinks, lots of stirring music and chatting to neighbours constituted for them a veritable heaven. My English companions, Gary and Paul, who’d come to a parade for the first time, had had a surprisingly good time; we’d been entertained for lunch at the Orange Hall where, as always, I was the only woman guest, and had a chat with Lord Brookeborough, grandson of a Northern Ireland prime minister and one of the few remaining members of the Ulster gentry still in the Orange Order. He had introduced us to an Orangeman in a wheelchair, an ex-member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, whose legs had been blown off as he helped a Catholic, who was too drunk to walk properly, to get away from a place that was being evacuated. He was a cheerful man who said he had merely done his job, had no bitterness and was grateful to God for having spared him.

Now a friend was taking Gary and Paul and me to a day that a lot of parade-connoisseurs regard as the best spectacle in Northern Ireland: the annual parade of the Armagh Royal Black Preceptories and the Sham Fight.

A Black event is prized by all of those who want to see the loyal institutions at their most disciplined, dignified and responsible. And because of the nature of the Black, a far smaller portion of the bands are ‘blood-and-thunder’. So it’s a splendid outing for accordion, pipe and silver bands. (One of the pleasures of a parade is to see someone I have met socially appear completely transformed. I remember gentle, slightly diffident Eric suddenly appearing in front of me resplendent in his kilt and bagpipes, exuding joy and pride in his band and his community.)

The problem with Scarva is that it has become too popular and the lane down which the parade goes is narrow. If you want to walk along with a band, you have to do so behind the families sitting in their folding chairs or on their blankets, swigging soft drinks and munching sandwiches and cake. Scarva is a bit too respectable and tame to attract yobs although there is sometimes a bit of trouble from the small lager-drinking brigade.

Our day was complicated by my needing to have a word with James Molyneaux, the Imperial Sovereign Grand Master, who was leading the parade. ‘We’ll go through the fields,’ announced our country friend, and took off at speed to lead us over barbed-wire fences and thorn-hedges and across boggy land and through muddy puddles to find Molyneaux before he disappeared into Scarvagh House to dine with the dignitaries. When we finally made it via the back route into the field, it was already full of stalls and Blackmen and bands and families. There was no sign of Molyneaux and the platform was deserted. So I had to climb over yet another fence and go to Scarvagh House.

By this time the Sham Fight between King James II, the loyal institutions’ hate figure, and their hero, King William III, was in train. It is a bizarre and rather touching event, given an emotional context because there is an oak tree in the grounds under which William is supposed to have camped on his way to the Boyne. The following year, when I actually walked the route more or less backwards about twenty yards in front of the parade, I was highly diverted that the leading marshals were a King James and a King William in vaguely period uniform, in green and red respectively, adorned with tricorne hats with appropriate cockades. It rather takes away from the mystique when the two great enemies are engaged in moving bystanders out of harm’s way, but then, except for a little ritual in Orange lodges, mystique is not much prized in that part of the world.

What happens at the Sham Fight is that, when everybody has arrived in the field, King William and his main henchman General Schomberg on the one hand, and King James and General Patrick Sarsfield on the other, appear on horseback to thunderous applause followed by motley footsoldiers more or less dressed for the part. After riding round and round for a while, the kings and generals, still on horseback, fight each other with swords while their followers use swords, pistols with blanks or just generally tussle. The fight – which is supposed to represent the four Williamite Irish battles: Derry, Enniskillen, Aughrim and the Boyne – rages enthusiastically all round the field with much gunshot, shouting, laughter and cheering. By the end of the fight, James’s standard has been destroyed, William’s is held high and James runs away.

That year I couldn’t see a thing. The following year I got the hang of it when I was allowed on the platform. But what I did have was access to the Scarva joke, for I was marooned for quite some time outside the house where Molyneaux was eating, with a Black marshal who was very fond of it. It runs: ‘Who won?’ (or, as he pronounced it, ‘Hee wan?’), a question he addressed to me and about half-a-dozen different people over the next twenty minutes amid his chortles of delighted laughter. I learned that the accepted response is something along the lines of, ‘I don’t know. I’ll have to ask.’

As a spectacle, the Sham Fight is a bit amateurish. ‘They really should call in the Sealed Knot,’ observed a journalist the following year, alluding to a collection of military history buffs who refight the battles of the English Civil War with great attention to accuracy and expertise. But that kind of professionalism would spoil the fun. The Sham Fight is put on by local people for their neighbours and, like them, it is without pretension. It is a homely and reassuringly familiar occasion.

The marshal had been rattled by my request to see Molyneaux, not so much because he was Imperial Sovereign Grand Master and retired Ulster Unionist Party leader, but because he was having his dinner. He was so shocked at the notion that a man might be distracted from feeding even by being passed a message saying, ‘Can I see you when you’re free?’, that though he was a friendly and obliging man, it took half an hour before he could nerve himself to do the deed.

I eventually talked and laughed a bit with Molyneaux, whose public image is dour, but who is a gentle wit, in the hallway of the Victorian house, the light filtering through the stained-glass window representing King William on a white horse; then he and his colleagues decamped to the platform to say prayers, sing hymns, make sensible speeches and move moderate resolutions.

The men were dozing on the grass when I got back. We stayed long enough to listen to Molyneaux’s part of the proceedings and then went off and had some foul hamburgers. Paul looked around the field and pronounced that, apart from the regalia, it was exactly like an English agricultural show. We left early, because if you don’t get back to your car ahead of the parade, it is possible to be stuck behind cars and coaches for an hour. And after all that fresh air and blameless activity, we badly needed beer.

5. The Apprentice Boys, 10 August 1996

I had gone to Derry^* the day before with Paul, who had become a parade aficionado, to sightsee and look at the route that was causing such massive arguments. For the preceding weeks and months, horse-trading had been going on to try to gain the agreement of the Bogside Residents’ Group (BRG) to a walk along the city walls by the Apprentice Boys as part of their annual commemoration of the siege of 1689. The institution reveres the thirteen apprentice boys who defied their elders and closed the gates to keep out King James’s army.

Derry is not just the Mecca of the Apprentice Boys, it is their raison d’être. It is a cruel irony for them that it is now almost wholly in nationalist hands: of the 60,000 inhabitants of the city, only 1,500 are Protestant, and they feel vulnerable to what they believe is a policy of ethnic cleansing.

Times were tense. A month before, the volte-face on Drumcree had led to full-scale riots, complete with petrol bombs and plastic bullets, leading to the death of one protester. Alistair Simpson, the Apprentice Boys’ governor, had worked tirelessly to reach agreement with the residents’ group. Unlike the leaders of the Orange Order, who refused to negotiate parade routes with convicted terrorists, he had agreed to meet the leader of the BRG, Donncha MacNiallais.

Simpson and his colleagues had offered various concessions about numbers, about not playing any music as they walked on the part of the walls that overlooked the Bogside, and, in desperation, had suggested that screens be erected so that no Bogside resident would have to see the Apprentice Boys and barbed wire be put in place to ensure no Apprentice Boy could approach the Bogside even if he wanted to. Even so, agreement had proved impossible. As a reporter in the Sinn Féin organ An Phoblacht/Republican News put it: ‘They [the BRG] sought an overall accommodation with the Apprentice Boys involving the acceptance of the principle of consent for all contentious parades, wherever and by whomever they were organized. This the Apprentice Boys were unable to deliver, and talks broke down over the issue.’ From Simpson’s point of view, MacNiallais had moved the goalposts beyond reach.

To pre-empt trouble, on Wednesday the Secretary of State had banned the parade from the contentious part of the walls and had moved troops in to seal them off. In a particularly surreal contribution, a Bogside resident was quoted the following day in An Phoblacht/Republican News. ‘Why are they creating a screened walkway? … The suspicion is that they are to be used to allow the march to go ahead outside the view of residents.’

When I met the gentle and courteous Alistair Simpson on the Friday, he was still depressed by the last meeting he had had with MacNiallais and the insults he had had to endure and he was apprehensive about the build-up of frustration among the Apprentice Boys, but he was confident he would find a way to avert violence.

Friday afternoon was enlivened by seeing in action in front of the Guildhall the legendary Mary Nelis, Sinn Féin councillor and mother of MacNiallais, dubbed by a unionist colleague ‘the republican movement’s answer to Winnie Mandela’.^* Less diplomatic than her son, she had recently observed in a speech that the Apprentice Boys should know that those whom she represented had ‘never conceded your right to exist’. Mrs Nelis enjoys drama (she is notorious among journalists for the frequency with which, in front of television cameras during nationalist protests, she appears to faint under the feet of RUC men). She was holding forth to a small audience and a couple of television cameras about the evils of internment (which had ended in 1975) as a warm-up for the big anti-internment march due in Belfast on the Sunday. Behind her was a backing group of a dozen or so youths in black hoods facing the wall with their hands pressed up against the building, adding impact to her rhetoric about the wicked manner in which internees had been interrogated twenty-five years previously.

I waited until Nelis finished telling us of past injustices, tried and failed to catch the words of some doleful song about the wrongs of internment which was wailing over the tannoy and went into the Guildhall to meet the unionist mayor, Apprentice Boy and Orangeman, Richard Dallas. For participating in an Orange demonstration over Drumcree, Dallas had been stripped by nationalist councillors of everything that could be stripped from him and could not use the mayor’s room, so we sat in the council chamber until it was needed for a function and then in the tiny robing-room which we shared with a large vacuum cleaner.

After the meeting Paul and I walked what we could of the Derry walls and then went down into the Bogside. It was dominated by a vast new mural of a circle containing a faceless figure in bowler hat, black suit and Orange collarette with a diagonal red line across. Around the circle were written DERRY, GARVAGHY and LOWER ORMEAU. At the top was NO CONSENT. At the bottom, NO PARADE. (A few months later An Phoblacht/Republican News reported that at a discussion organized during the West Belfast Festival, a visitor from a Christian ecumenical group said ‘nationalists shouldn’t demonize Orangemen’, citing the ‘NO SECTARIAN MARCHES’ poster with the image of a faceless Orangeman. However, John Gormley of LOCC [Lower Ormeau Concerned Citizens], who first produced the poster, said, ‘We use that image because we don’t know what an Orangeman looks like given their refusal to meet with us and discuss the issue.’)

From the estate itself, we looked at the wall. It became clear that only a very few residents could see the walls from their houses and they would be able to see only the tops of tall people’s heads. So what the BRG had been complaining about was that at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning it would be theoretically possible for some residents to see a procession of bowler hats passing silently 100 yards away.

An engagement in Tyrone meant that we could not hang around to see the march in Derry city centre organized by the BRG to demand, according to the subsequent An Phoblacht/Republican News account, ‘equality for all the nationalists of Northern Ireland. At the rally, both Donncha MacNiallais and Martin McGuinness stressed the importance of continuing solidarity with nationalists in small villages throughout the Six Counties who each year had Orange marches forced upon them.’ A protest rally was planned for the following afternoon.

On Saturday morning we arrived in blazing sunshine, left our car near where dozens of coaches were off-loading Apprentice Boys and bands and walked across the bridge and into the city. Derry is a lovely city, much improved in recent years through investment by the British government, the European Union and the foreign-owned businesses courted by John Hume and others. Although in many respects it has blossomed under nationalist rule – it is, for instance, much more cosmopolitan than it used to be – many of those who love it with irrational passion are now wholly out of power. Derry Protestants love every stone in those walls; Derry republicans seem to hate it. Certainly they are still happy to vandalize it whenever there is an excuse. It is almost as if centuries of feeling excluded have made them loathe the very buildings. Tony Crowe, Apprentice Boy and historian, observed to me:

Derry was like a kept woman, a young prostitute, in an ironic way. When she was a young maiden she was loved and feted by the unionists and she was seen as the untaken bride and known as the Maiden City. And then when they inherited her eventually in the late 1960s, the nationalists couldn’t thole her because she still carried some of the vestiges of her early whoredom. Republicans systematically bombed and buggered the city and peaceful nationalists didn’t mind too much because they couldn’t relate to it. Now there’s no refurbishment of fine buildings like you have in the Republic in cities like Limerick: the old St Augustine’s rectory was knocked down and turned into a car park. It was within the walls, so nationalists felt it didn’t belong to them.

On our way to meet friends, Paul and I stopped to take a photograph of some graffiti in a loyalist area and were instantly challenged by a couple of thuggish-looking locals. Who were we? ‘Journalists,’ I said. ‘We don’t like journalists. You never write anything good about us. You’re all biased.’ ‘We’re not. We’re sympathetic,’ I said, having no desire to start the day with trouble. The yobs clearly thought this highly unlikely, but their aggression nonetheless lessened somewhat. ‘Just tell the truth,’ one of them said grumpily and off they went. You can always rely on loyalists to do their best to alienate, just as you can rely on their republican counterparts to woo the press politely and articulately.

We went on to the gloomy Victorian premises of the Northern Counties Club, where many Apprentice Boys were gathering for their dinner. It was 11.30 and their service at St Columb’s Cathedral was now over. The news was that in the middle of the previous night the RUC had agreed to allow thirteen Apprentice Boys to touch each of the gates in Derry’s walls as a symbolic re-enactment of their closing in 1690. At Butcher Gate, the RUC had asked one of the BRG stewards who was on duty all night if they could speak to MacNiallais. ‘When I found that no regalia at all was involved,’ MacNiallais explained to An Phoblacht/Republican News, ‘no bands or singing or shouting sectarian remarks, I told them we had no problem with this. Myself and a group of stewards escorted them to Butcher Gate, to Magazine Gate and towards Shipquay Gate. It was all very respectful on every side.’ For the Apprentice Boys, being patronized like that was very hard to bear.

We supped beer with Chris McGimpsey and several other of his brethren and left him to his big feed while we went to the Apprentice Boys’ Memorial Hall, paint-spattered and pock-marked from the paint bombs and ball-bearings that are launched at it regularly from the Bogside. In a tiny garden beside it is a statue of one of the Apprentice Boys’ heroes, Governor Walker. In the 1970s the tall pillar on which he stood was destroyed by a bomb; more recently another blew his hand off and damaged his face. Alistair Simpson spoke to the media and the crowd to announce that though they greatly regretted being prevented from walking the walls, they would not challenge the ban, but would walk the walls another day of their own choosing. Face was saved. The majority of the Apprentice Boys were relieved; the more militant were disappointed. Like most of the media they had been hoping for a fight.

After chatting with a few Apprentice Boys, we were led off by our friend Henry to the best watching-place, just by the walls at the top of the hill leading to the Fountain Estate, the loyalist ghetto, festooned with a mass of red, white and blue bunting and flags and the remnants of the mighty bonfire of the previous night. He wanted us to experience the sheer emotion that grips the Apprentice Boys as the walls come into view. The drawback was that instead of the usual wide variety of music, most of the bands inevitably broke into ‘Derry’s Walls’ as they approached their Mecca. Among the crowds a woman held up a poster saying ‘ULSTER PROTESTANTS DEMAND PARITY OF ESTEEM’, which showed that some PR lessons were being learned from the enemy.

It was a wonderful parade, full of vigour and brilliance of colour and sound, heightened in its impact when compared to its Belfast Orange counterpart because of the narrowness of some of the streets through which it passed. It’s a strange mixture of spectacle and intimacy and if you are on a narrow street it is easy to spot your friends as they stride past. Pointing at Mike or Graham or Chris or Jim, catching their eye and exchanging waves and smiles is one of the pleasures of parade-watching.

It was with some regret therefore that, in the early afternoon, duty called me to the Bogside to attend the three o’clock protest meeting. There was no IRA ceasefire at the time and there were fears of an organized assault on the RUC and the Apprentice Boys. Violence didn’t seem likely this time, since there wasn’t an awful lot for them to protest about, but one could never be sure.

My unionist friends just laughed when I suggested they might like to come with me, but Paul came along. We had to go by a longish indirect route because I had forgotten my press pass and so could not go through police lines. We got to the ‘Free Derry’ wall that is the Bogside equivalent of Speakers’ Corner just in time to hear MacNiallais uttering the word ‘Finally’, thanking the two or three hundred people present for their restraint and announcing the cancellation of the rally. The pretext was a generous gesture to the Apprentice Boys; the reality was that the turnout was so poor the protest would have presented badly. And then I caught the eye of Mitchel McLaughlin, the chairman of Sinn Féin.

A plausible and likeable fellow, McLaughlin is despised by the hard men because, unlike most other Sinn Féin leaders, he never served in the IRA; his nickname in Derry is ‘the draft-dodger’. He was wearing a smart grey suit and chatting to a young admirer, who told him, her eyes glowing with hero-worship, that he would have her vote. He is John Hume’s main challenger for his Westminster seat.

We had not met for a year, during which time I had frequently savaged IRA/Sinn Féin in print and had defended the Orangemen’s right to walk from Drumcree Church down Garvaghy Road, but McLaughlin, a complete professional, betrayed not a flicker of hostility. We shook hands: ‘Ruth, you are very welcome to Derry.’ Paul was similarly warmly greeted. Rather churlishly, the thought flickered through my mind that McLaughlin sounded as if he owned the bloody place. He then spent the next fifteen minutes or so explaining most courteously how I was completely wrong to have thought that Sinn Féin was behind the anti-parade agitation and expressing genuine amazement that I could have spoken up for the now ‘finished’ David Trimble, whom republicans were convinced had been politically destroyed by the fall-out from Drumcree.

He was called away to sort out some trouble, we nodded goodbye civilly, and Paul and I ambled up to Butcher Gate, where a small disappointed mob were looking for trouble. We returned to the parade just in time to see an alarmingly nasty-looking Ulster Freedom Fighters colour party, who should not have been part of the parade but who were ecstatically greeted by the inhabitants of the Fountain. There were other occasional jarring notes provided by militaristic bands.

The Apprentice Boys, being a mainly urban and working-class organization, attract some people who think the Orange is for wimps and the Black for old men. There have been problems with one or two clubs which are nothing more than fronts for paramilitaries and whose members turn up at parades in dark glasses and strut menacingly. (This was to be more evident the following year when two or three bands carried banners saying: ‘RE-ROUTE REPUBLICANS OUT OF NORTHERN IRELAND’.) Yet these represent a tiny fraction of the participants in a parade which is largely well-disciplined and brilliantly stewarded.

We headed for the Apprentice Boys’ HQ to look at some memorabilia, to find ourselves briefly caught, like the RUC, between drunken bottle-throwing loyalists and stone-throwing Bogsiders. A few minutes later, returning to the centre, we found tremendous RUC and media activity in a side-street. Cautiously peering around the armoured cars I saw the RUC extracting a dozen or so violent drunks from a pub while surrounded by perhaps twenty photographers and cameramen. At one stage a policeman almost fell over a TV camera. The yobs, of course, played up enthusiastically to their audience and obligingly created a small mini-riot with stones, glasses, bottles and anything else they could get their hands on. There was not an Apprentice Boy among them, for they had all marched over the bridge and were on their way to their coaches, but of course the violence was the scene that was shown on most news bulletins.

In 1997, the Apprentice Boys showed they were learning something about PR and began to speak of the parade as a pageant. There were lengthy discussions with politicians and residents and the nationalist SDLP mayor gave the Apprentice Boys his support. Reluctantly, MacNiallais agreed to allow the pageant’s participants on to the wall, so children dressed as King William and Queen Mary and assembled attendants walked along it in the morning. There was a difficulty about the flag outside the Apprentice Boys’ HQ: the union flag would be offensive. So the Apprentice Boys’ historian produced a green flag with a harp in the middle, which symbolized the unity of England and Ireland in 1689. The BRG did not identify it in time to object. They have since deemed it unacceptable.

Still, an accommodation had been worked out and there was no need to put a police line between the Bogsiders and the marchers. McNiallais and some colleagues came up to look at the parade and then some of their number began taunting the most militaristic-looking bands. A few bandsmen broke ranks and there was a scuffle.

I was at the same vantage point as the year before; exaggerated rumours were spreading about the level of trouble. That was a sufficient excuse for a couple of hundred drunks from the Fountain to start throwing stones and bottles and glasses at police: none of them was an Apprentice Boy. Television cameras were there again. Loyalists, as usual, were handing propaganda gifts to the enemy.

Having had the experience craved by all journalists of being hit by a stone that didn’t hurt but nevertheless gave one street-cred, I left that riot as it died down and with my English friend Mark proceeded to the Bogside. There was a crowd of children, mostly between six and sixteen, throwing stones at the police who were sealing off Butcher Gate and guarding the Apprentice Boys’ building. Standing in the middle of the kids, I could see how dehumanized are policemen in riot gear: they looked more like a row of Darth Vaders than human beings. But then you can’t withstand stones and petrol bombs in a woolly cardigan.

Out from the Bogside with MacNiallais came Gearóid Ó hEara, chairman of Northern Sinn Féin. He walked up to the middle of the crowd of children, put his arms around two of the littler ones and said: ‘Away now down to the Bog. You don’t want the international TV cameras to be seeing you behaving like Orangies.’^* There was a diminution in the stone-throwing and some children drifted back through the gate. Then the television cameras went away. So did Ó hEara and MacNiallais. It was a dull, grey afternoon as well whiled away by stone-throwing as by anything else, so the children went back to work vigorously. A dog, who was clearly a seasoned rioter, rushed up and down between the children and the police barking, until he got hit by a stone and hobbled off whimpering. The children went on throwing stones: no grown-up came out of the Bogside to try to stop them.

MacNiallais was busy elsewhere, explaining to the media that nationalists had been assaulted during the parade and there would therefore now be no tolerance for the December Apprentice Boys’ parade; it would not now be allowed to go around the Diamond in the commercial centre of Derry.

Simpson had offered to halve the normal numbers in December but the BRG were not prepared to compromise. The day before the parade, which the police refused to ban, republicans went around shops and restaurants in Derry telling them to close: this form of intimidation is carried out by republican and loyalist thugs on special occasions and few businessmen are strong enough to withstand it.^* So MacNiallais was able to complain that the parade had closed down the commercial life of Derry on a Saturday before Christmas to the inconvenience of everyone.

A well-orchestrated Bogsiders’ riot began behind the police lines that separated them from the Apprentice Boys. The complaint was that because Butcher Gate was closed off, they were being hemmed in; the alternative, longer, route to the city centre was unacceptable. The television showed Martin McGuinness and Mitchel McLaughlin being denied permission by the RUC to go through their lines. The riot followed shortly afterwards. There was a rare slip-up when a Sky camera took a shot of McGuinness smiling broadly at the stone-throwing Bogsiders. Later in the evening, a phalanx of youngsters arrived at the city centre from the Bogside wheeling shopping trolleys full of petrol bombs, of which about 1,000 were fired at police.

The allegation that this had been a spontaneous riot resulting from the disruption of the commercial life of the city at Christmas time did not convince on this occasion. The general conclusion was that the republican leadership had thought it useful to allow some of their hotheads to let off steam: the bill for the city was five million; the damage to the reputation of Derry abroad incalculable.

6. Glenageeragh, 15 June 1997

‘Like migratory birds, we return to the same scene every year,’ said Henry, as we headed towards his Orange Lodge’s annual service. ‘Whole families come together from elsewhere in the province or overseas. Like Christmas, it’s a time for family bonding. We tread well-trodden roads that our own blood have walked for many generations, be it to a country lane, to a rural church or through a little village or down a main thoroughfare into a town.’

Of all my Northern Irish friends, Catholic or Protestant, Henry has the greatest sense of place. A farmer who believes in working with rather than against nature, he has a view of the land that takes account of beauty as well as utility. Because he spends so much of his life in physical labour, his mind and his imagination have plenty of time to roam free and much of his intellectual energy is devoted to devising ways of making his people comprehensible to the modern world. A typical phone call from Henry will begin: ‘As I was graiping the silage this morning, I was thinking that another thing that makes my lot [i.e. his people] so cussed is …’ Or he might be in fatalistic mood: ‘Well, don’t worry about it: whatever we do, the rivers of destiny will find their own way into the sea of history.’

Henry had decided it was time I engaged with a past not focused on King Billy or the siege of Derry. ‘We’re going to where my family come from, where my blood flows, and to the burial ground of my people, Presbyterians all,’ he said, as we drove along the Clogher Valley. ‘Look at it. Picturesque, quiet, typical south Tyrone countryside, with its rolling hills and green grass.’

Of Scots planter stock on both sides, Henry’s lines can be traced back in Ulster to the late 1700s. He stopped to point upwards. ‘At the top of that hill, that’s where my great-grandmother McMaster was reared, looking on to the Clogher Valley. This water here goes into the Blackwater system which runs into Lough Neagh: the Blackwater is very fertile, warm ground. The bottom end of the Foyle is good ground too, which is why in Derry there are so many Presbyterian churches along its banks. As the seagull follows the plough, the Presbyterian follows the good land. Not that my people were gifted with the best of fertile land, but slowly we kept labouring on, always trying to improve ourselves.’

A few miles down the road he had shown me, with unconcealed emotion, the remains of a small building in a tiny overgrown patch of green, which once had been a thatched house. It was there that Henry’s paternal grandfather and at least seven siblings were born between 1880 and 1890. Two boys became farmers, one boy joined the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the girl married. And like so many Ulster Protestants before and after them, three of the boys emigrated, one to Canada and two to the United States.

In 1932, Henry’s grandfather had taken a huge risk. He had sold this 17-acre small farm to a Catholic neighbour and bought a 120-acre farm near Omagh, twenty miles north, which had been in the hands of a bank for five years. In 1923, it had been sold for £3,500, but farm values had been plummeting and the bank ended up repossessing it. ‘Grandfather gave £1,050 for it – huge money for him – and since an earlier owner had bought it from a landlord under a government purchase act, there was an annuity of £50 a year due on it too. The house was in rotten condition, with rushes six feet high, but grandfather was strong, gutsy and determined.’

Henry’s maternal grandfather took an equal risk. Descended from a family of small farmers who came from Ayrshire in the 1600s, he moved from Keady in County Armagh, intended by his father to buy a particular sensible property, ‘but he took a shine to a place no one else would take. His father was annoyed and wouldn’t give him any financial help. But he bought the place anyway, stayed there alone for years before he married, farming, making his own bread, washing his own clothes and hanging food off the rafters at night so the rats couldn’t get it.’

The Second World War put farmers on their feet, so both grandfathers prospered. The maternal grandfather wasn’t as physically strong as the paternal, but he had a gift for figures, so he branched out. ‘He always did his sums first before he attempted anything.’ On retirement at seventy he had a lot more land as well as other businesses. We saw the farms of Henry’s aunt and Henry’s cousin and the house his maternal grandfather was supposed in the first place to buy but had ‘taken umbrage against’. Henry knew every twist in the road. ‘This is home. Even if you had no blood connections to Clogher Valley, you’d feel attached to it: it’s homely. It’s always good to come back to it, irregardless of how far you go in the world. And the fact that it’s green, deep land and that most of your blood comes from it, I suppose is something that endears it to you as well.’

Then in front of us was Glenhoy church. ‘When Presbyterians were eventually given permission to build meeting houses, there wasn’t much good land left. When we got round to getting our own piece of land around here we drew the short straw. It’s damnable to dig graves here because it’s pure rock a foot down: they have to bring in compressors to bust it.

‘My paternal ancestors lie here. And they were all in my Orange Lodge, LOL 908. And there’s the new hall we built last year.’ He stopped at the top of a hill and pointed down. ‘If you stepped back to 1848 (the year the church was built) you would find my great-great-grandfather walking in procession on the same country lane I now walk in one of the glens of the Clogher Valley to our little kirk on the hill. It’s in the blood and calls from deep within us, our little ritual to let the outside world know we’re still here.’

We were late, too late for Henry to join the assembly a mile down the road and parade like his great-great-grandfather up to the church. But as we waited he talked more about the Clogher Valley and how even though his paternal grandfather had moved away from that area he would always come back to this lodge. One of Henry’s two brothers would be here today. His father would have been along too but he had to attend another Orange service elsewhere.

Henry’s forebears achieved high office in the Orange Order: his father, grandfathers and great-grandfather were variously Worshipful Masters of lodges and districts and even the county. Henry confined himself to being lodge treasurer for a few years, an office which he said was undemanding: he took the extreme modernizing step of opening a bank account, he collected the dues and kept the very simple books. Although he has an intense emotional attachment to his lodge, which he had joined as a junior, he has no interest in holding office again. This is a sign of the times that in some ways worries him: ‘A hundred years ago, high offices would have tended to be held by Church of Ireland clergy right up to bishops, as well as by the old gentry. Some of those lads had a lot of backbone as well as standing – and some of them were cranky and mad as hell.’

Henry told me the story of a County Grand Master of Tyrone. The improbably named Anketell Moutray was kidnapped by the IRA in 1922 with forty others and taken across the border to be used as bargaining counters for eleven IRA men from County Monaghan, who had been arrested in Northern Ireland. Moutray, who was eighty, drove his captors crazy by incessantly singing in a cracked voice penitential psalms and ‘God Save the King’.

Henry talked of how the gentry began to disappear: compulsory purchase legislation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had required many to sell their farms and two world wars had killed off many more. The leadership of the Orange became dominated by the business and professional classes, people like his grandparents. But in Henry’s generation, people like that are busier than in the past and less able to give their time and their effort to what are often the mundane details of lodge work. ‘It’s not that I work physically harder than my ancestors, but life has become more demanding. For instance, they didn’t have to spent their evenings bogged down in paperwork.’ And at higher levels within the loyal institutions, where there are endless meetings, these days people with small businesses are in danger of going to the wall.

There were very few people in the hamlet, just a few cars, a handful of wives and maybe ten or twelve children. It was a nice day and there was a silver band and it was pleasant to hear the strains of hymn music wafting up the hill and seeing in the distance the advancing procession of Orangemen, many of whom, when they finally arrived, had faces so weather-beaten that not even a townee like me could doubt their occupation.

There were only about fifty people present. The lodge has only forty brethren, of whom just over half were there and then there were guest Orangemen and other visitors. There was a pause for a chat with families, friends and acquaintances and then it was time to reassemble to walk in formation into the church. With the other non-processors, I followed them in and sat at the back of the little church in a right-hand pew along with women and children: across the aisle was the band.

The young Presbyterian minister wasn’t an Orangeman. Only about 12 per cent of them are, Henry told me afterwards, because, particularly in the rural parts, it was so much a family thing; this minister had no such connections. The service was the usual mixture of hymns and prayers but I was pretty rocked by the sermon, particularly since I knew the guest preacher to be a member of the Church of Ireland. One of the twentieth-century assumptions I have learned to jettison since I started consorting with evangelical Protestants is that Presbyterians are necessarily more extreme than Anglicans. Certainly the Church of England is notoriously woolly and the Church of Ireland in the Republic is self-consciously liberal, but the circumstances of life in Northern Ireland are such that Protestants of all denominations are tougher, more evangelical, less ecumenical and inevitably more political than their counterparts elsewhere. What was on the mind of the Reverend William Hoey (who was later identified to me as the minister who had called Cardinal Daly ‘a red-hatted weasel’)^* was Drumcree, which, being only three weeks away, was on the minds of most people in Northern Ireland.

Reverend Hoey was certainly a lively and opinionated speaker, lukewarm only in his condemnation of loyalist paramilitaries who at the time were uttering various threats. In the Foreign-Officespeak that has been adopted and popularized by Sinn Féin and their counterparts in the Progressive Unionist Party, he said they weren’t ‘helpful’. He then reverted to Old-Testamentspeak and got stuck into the story of Nebuchadnezzar, who set up a golden image which all had to worship on pain of being cast into a fiery furnace; this appeared to be a metaphor for Drumcree. What bothered me slightly was that while Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego emerged from the furnace unscathed, as an unbeliever I wasn’t convinced that following the Reverend Hoey’s recommendation to trust in the Lord was going to be enough to extract the Orange Order unscathed from Drumcree. However, the preacher wasn’t worrying his congregation that much: at least four or five of the bandsmen had fallen asleep. Sunday afternoon following a large lunch is normally a time for hard-working countrymen to have a rest.

We sang our hymns and said our prayers and emerged into the sunshine. After some more chatting with ministers and friends, the men reassembled. A familiar face to which I couldn’t put a name smiled at me: I learned later he was a member of my Black Lodge. The silver band struck up a hymn and along with a few children I followed the Orangemen down the hill. We passed perhaps four houses on the way; the inhabitants were sitting in their gardens looking mildly interested. The only residents we upset were a collection of sheep who ran in panic to the opposite end of their field. After a mile or so the procession stopped, the Orangemen turned to face across the fields, the band struck up and we all sang the national anthem. Men resumed chatting for a while and then took off in their cars for home.

Henry and I walked back up the hill to where he had parked. ‘Forty years ago,’ he said, ‘this is what Drumcree was like. That’s what they don’t understand. We don’t need anybody to see us parading.’ ‘A woman rang up the David Dunseith phone-in programme on the BBC the other day,’ he added, ‘and said “The trouble over parade routes only comes when these so-called nationalists move into these areas”. It was unfortunately a very logical statement which would strike a chord with every Protestant in Portadown.

‘What have you got here? Four houses in a little over half a mile and only a few black cows and a few horny sheep to contend with. There are hundreds of parades like this. At Drumcree, the point of view of the Portadown man is: “My father and my grandfather walked through that way. Why should I change?” ‘ For inarticulate and threatened people, walking the territory is their way of expressing their link with the past.

When we got home, he showed me ‘Title Deeds’,^* a poem that to Henry best describes the passion of the Scots-Irish dissenters for the land they have tilled for centuries, which is understood by so few outside their community, especially those who still see them as foreigners and usurpers. Its inspiration was Genesis 23:20: ‘And the field and the cave that is therein were made sure unto Abraham for a possession.’

Grey, twisted stones, half hid in careless grass,

Scribed with faint names of those who sleep below,

Who once saw winter into summer pass,

Felt dawn in Ulster, watched her sunset glow

O’er every hill they furrowed with the plough,

On the white walls of homestead and of byre

Loved beyond death, even as men love them now,

With a devotion burning like a fire.

Graves of the men of Ulster, who came forth

To seek a better country than their own,

As Abraham from Ur once quested north

Obedient to the faith which led him on.

Obedient down the wandering of the years

Through many a hope deferred, a plan delayed,

Claiming the land for ever by his tears Shed at

the grave where his dear dust was laid.

So by these graves we claim the country still,

This land made rich by sacrifice and tears,

Held with such passionate love, such stubborn will, Tom from the people oft down bitter years,

Spoiled by the hirelings of a servile court,

Harried by prelates of a faith denied.

The rebels’ plunder and the landlords’ sport,

Yet loved of those who tilled her fields, and died,

And dying passed into her kindly mould

To sanctify for us each kirkyard green,

Each sheltered vale and every hillside cold,

And little highways where their feet have been.

Thus do we claim our country from the lord

As Abraham claimed his at Machpelah’s cave,

From age to age still runs the changeless word,

‘The land is his who claims it by a grave.’

It came as no surprise that such an anti-Episcopalian poem had been written by a Presbyterian minister. What was more surprising was that he was a distant kinsman of Henry’s, for I had thought all of his blood were farmers or businessmen apart from the odd engineer. And Henry was able to tell me the story that had inspired such ardent love of Ulster and such bitter denunciation of his ancestors’ persecutors.

The paternal family of the poet, John Worthington Johnston, had farmed south of the border in County Monaghan from King William’s time until, in the 1860s, as a result of some skulduggery by the landlord and his steward, who wanted the prosperous farm for himself, they had to move. In the Clogher Valley, Johnston’s grandfather started afresh and turned unproductive land into a fertile farm; he had seven children, including one who became Henry’s great-grandmother. When Johnston died at fifty-one, his eldest son took over, ran the farm and then became a Presbyterian minister. He had a church in County Antrim and then for a long time served in Dublin. His son John, who was born south of Dublin, was only twelve when his father’s church, the Abbey, was burned down during the 1916 Easter Rising.

John Johnston graduated from Trinity College Dublin with first-class honours in Classics and from Cambridge University with a first in Theology and then, like his father before him, became a minister in County Antrim. In October 1942 he joined the 1st Battalion of the Royal Ulster Rifles, in the 6th Airborne Division, and served as one of the small number of ‘parachute padres’ until invalided out in 1945 after a parachute jump that went wrong. Of his three daughters, one became a distinguished historian and the other two senior civil servants, one of whom later became, like her father and grandfather, a Presbyterian minister.

The story of the Johnstons is an illustration of how, until very recently, almost the only acceptable way for any rural Presbyterian to follow an intellectual route was through the ministry. And equally graphically, his poem shows how even one of the loftier intellects among Presbyterian ministers kept true to his roots. Being elected by the members of their congregation, and running their kirk hand-in-hand with their elders, keep ministers humble and in touch with reality.

In his book on Presbyterians, the Reverend John Dunlop described the Bible as ‘the book of a pilgrim people’, which goes a long way towards explaining why they identify so much with the Israelites of the Old Testament, an aspect of their collective psyche represented throughout the rituals of the Orange and Black institutions. There was not a man walking in an Orange collarette down that hill from Glenageeragh, thinking about Drumcree, in whom Johnston’s poem would not have struck a deep chord.

7. Rossnowlagh, 5 July 1997

The annual Orange parade in Rossnowlagh, County Donegal, in the Republic of Ireland, challenges two beliefs: the first that Orange marches are inherently territorial and triumphalist; the other that a United Ireland would stamp out the Protestant identity.

The truth is more complicated. Northern Irish Orangemen love the Rossnowlagh parade because there is no trouble and nothing to prove: citizens of the Republic of Ireland – in so far as they are aware of the parade’s existence – are happy about it because they think it shows how tolerant they are. Yet the Orangemen of the Republic of Ireland are very aware that since the foundation of the Irish Free State, for a variety of reasons – including persecution by the IRA at a local level – Orangemen are down to just one parade a year at the seaside and away from any towns. And all Protestants, North and South, are aware that since partition, while the Catholic population of Northern Ireland has increased steadily, the Protestant population in the Republic has decreased from 10 to 3 per cent. Many believe that they were persecuted; some that they were ethnically cleansed.

Still, Rossnowlagh is every romantic Orangeman’s idea of a happy family day out. You have the countryside, you have the seaside and there are no protesting nationalists. The parade is policed by two or three amiable gardaí. Or, as one Orangeman put it to me: ‘You walk into Rossnowlagh and there’ll be one guard saying: “How’re ye doin’, boy?” ’

It is an outing, it is an adventure, for it involves foreign travel and it is a way of linking up again with those of your comrades, your brothers, who found themselves after partition on the wrong side of the border. Of all the parades I attended, it was the one most redolent of a school outing in an innocent world: no khaki, no guns, no nasty graffiti, not a hint of violence and therefore, of course, no television cameras. Yet, since Rossnowlagh happens the day before the Drumcree church parade, a lot of people present were fearful about what might happen the following morning. So was I, but being a stranger there, my more immediate concern was how to find the right place on time and where to park my car.

There had been consternation among some of the Northern Irish brethren when they discovered that I was going to Rossnowlagh on my own. Gordon was distressed because a business engagement meant he couldn’t drive me there. Roy was on my mobile worrying that because of a funeral he couldn’t take me, but he gave me details of how to find people there who would look after me and invited me to tea in his Orange Hall in Fermanagh on my way home. Brian was also frustrated at not being able to come; he contemplated but proved unable to bring forward the service he was taking at a different funeral.

How long to get there, I asked Graham, whose favourite parade it is but who this year was doing duty elsewhere looking after the young at a Bible study camp. ‘Well, of course it’s fine while you’re in Northern Ireland,’ he explained, ‘because the roads are very good, but once you get over the border they’re absolutely dreadful, so you’ll have to allow about two hours.’ ‘You lot are always going on about the Republic’s bad roads like a kind of defence mechanism,’ I said. ‘It’s not confined to that,’ he said. ‘Every time I spend a few days in the Republic of Ireland I know more than ever I don’t want to be part of a United Ireland.’ He paused. ‘But then maybe when you’re abroad, you always see the worst of it the longer you’re there.’ ‘Why doesn’t that apply to home?’ I asked, and he replied, Oh, that’s different. That’s like saying that your house needs a bit of renovation.’

I left my Orange friends in Portadown, noting as I looked back that there was an Ulster flag flying from a flagpole above my bedroom window. As I drove along the excellent roads fretting about Drumcree I got depressed once again about how deceptively tranquil is the countryside and how awful the sufferings of many of its inhabitants. You come out of Armagh into the Clogher Valley and thence to Fermanagh of the lakes and everywhere is lovely and well-tended and apparently peaceful; the fields are neat and the cattle sleek and the adolescent lambs are gambolling, yet road signs throw up reminders of atrocity after atrocity and latterly, reflecting my new preoccupations, of lower-level inter-communal cruelties and sectarian strife and the burning of Orange halls and the vandalizing of Catholic churches and the boycotting of decent shopkeepers from both tribes.

Then I knew I was in Donegal, for the roads had, in truth, suddenly become very bad. Seeing from a sign that my destination was, however, only 8 kilometres away, I thought Graham had been making rather a fuss, but then I got caught behind a bus with a shamrock on the back which crawled all the way to Rossnowlagh; it turned out to be a shuttle-bus for transporting fragile Orangepeople around the place.

Rossnowlagh farmers are happy annually to make a few bob out of this incursion from the North so there was no shortage of paying car parks. It was a sunny day, I wandered back to the assembly point and watched out for the people I was supposed to be linking up with, but inevitably I’d forgotten half the relevant details, like the number of their lodge, and was confined to wandering about the place asking people if they knew a big man with a moustache who came from Cavan. But then another coach drew up at the assembly point and out of it emerged the friendly face of the Grand Master, Bobby Saulters.

Bobby Saulters is sunny-natured, humorous and fatalistic, which in his difficult position is just as well. He is also without self-importance. As he stood there clutching his bowler hat and beaming at people, he was ribbed about something he had said on television that had annoyed the Orange hard-line pressure group known as the Spirit of Drumcree. ‘Ach,’ said Bobby, laughing, ‘you should have heard what was on my answering machine when I got home.’

Like all Orangemen of my acquaintance, Saulters cannot see you without worrying that you might be hungry. Having established that, unlike the brethren in the coaches, I had not stopped for refreshment along the way, he said we must go to the meeting hall for tea. We wandered up and joined a queue of Orangemen and their families: there was no VIP line, no notion in anyone’s mind, let alone his, that the Grand Master deserved any special attention other than a warm welcome for having come all the way from Belfast.

By now a veteran of church and Orange and village halls and refreshment tents in fields, I marvelled with Saulters that we were given proper crockery. Here catering was not left just to the ladies: a clergyman was in charge of selling sandwiches and a layman in charge of the teapots. The whole event was very much a community effort by local Protestants. I had a sandwich and refused cake, but Saulters was so worried that I might faint from hunger on the parade that eventually he persuaded me to parcel up a cake in a napkin and put it in my bag for later. I ate it in the afternoon sitting on the grass during the service.

There seemed to be far more women than usual in the Rossnowlagh parade. I studied their clothes for a while. There was a wide variation in the dress code probably reflecting differences between rural and urban and middle-class and working-class backgrounds. One lodge had everyone dressed identically, regardless of what suited their colouring or size, in another everyone wore a suit and hat of the same colour but in different styles, another permitted skirts of any colour but all jackets were black and there was one in which they wore their best outfits, which were all different.

I ambled along with the parade in company with Gerry, an Irish journalist (I think we were the only media representatives there). We enjoyed the sunshine and the walk and the music and talking politics and people. When we reached the little seaside town, it proved to be unpretentious and unspoiled. There were the usual stalls selling fast food, books and souvenirs. Most people settled down by the sea or in the field and ate their own picnics.

The hotel was full up, crammed with feeding dignitaries or Orangepeople who had pre-booked – the usual number swollen by the presence of some members of the Imperial Grand Council – but my companion and I got into the bar because we were journalists. The manager depressed us by telling us that for the first time ever, they had no guests staying this year because of the parade. They had never had any problems at Rossnowlagh; there never had been any tension and it had always been seen as a day for both communities. But Drumcree Two had changed the climate and people were frightened.

Having looked at the more interesting stalls we settled down in the field waiting for the usual problems of whistling microphones and missing speakers to be resolved by the hosts. I recorded some of the speeches. Most memorable was the thoughtful address by Dr Warren Porter, Presbyterian clergyman and an Assistant Grand Master of the Orange. It was no accident that he chose as the text on which to preach these verses from 1 Peter 2:

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.

Having your conversation honest amongst the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation.

Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme;

Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well.

For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men:

As free, and not using your liberty for a cloak of maliciousness, but as the servants of God.

Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king.

Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward.

For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully.

For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God.

The message could not have been plainer, and it was echoed by other platform speakers who implicitly or explicitly urged restraint. Here are a few extracts from speeches which – apart from coded messages about Drumcree – are typical of how Orangemen greet each other from platforms.

Right Worshipful County Grand Master, Most Worshipful Imperial Grand Master, Most Worshipful Brother Saulters, County and District Officers, brethren, sisters, ladies and gentlemen, it’s my pleasure and privilege to have the distinct honour indeed to be here today at such an excellent gathering. As I look out across this wonderful crowd, the colourful display, the respect, the dignity and the discipline that we’ve just shown, it typifies what many Orange gatherings are about and that they do no harm to anybody whatsoever … I would like bring to the members of Donegal County Grand Orange Lodge fraternal greetings from the County Fermanagh Grand Orange Lodge. It is a pleasure indeed and a privilege to represent County Fermanagh here this afternoon and I look forward to welcoming those of you who can come next Saturday to County Fermanagh to our demonstration there.