The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions. Ruth Edwards Dudley

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ