The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions

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.

Orangemen know what they’re about. They show that responsibility, that dignity, that restraint and that discipline. That’s what we are about. That’s what we project to the world. That’s what I trust, ladies and gentlemen, we always will be about.

It’s been my pleasure to be here and I thank Donegal for the warmth of welcome, for their hospitality and for the real dignity that they have shown this afternoon. Thank you very much.

He was answered by an aged Orangeman.

Thanks, Brother Foster, for your kind words. In regard of the County of Donegal I could be possibly one of the oldest Orangemen here today. I have been connected with the County Donegal Grand Lodge for over sixty years, and I have been attending the Twelfth of July parades for somewhere around seventy-five years. And I want people to see the way the Orangemen here and our brothers of Northern Ireland are and we never had no friction whatsoever. We came and went home peacefully and quietly and there was no act of discredit to our collarettes.

Then Antrim:

Most Worshipful Grand Master, Imperial Grand Master, Worshipful County Grand Master, brethren, sisters and friends.

(#ulink_e4708923-bad7-560b-98c1-10f95d1d3e69) Being the last speaker I feel that I want to on this first occasion associate myself sincerely with all that the previous speakers have said. I came down with the North Antrim District Lodge and we had a wonderful trip down. This has been my first time down into the demonstration here and I would like to take this opportunity today on behalf of County Antrim Grand Orange Lodge to bring the good wishes of our County to the brethren of County Donegal here and all the brethren in the Republic of Ireland. We do appreciate what you have done for the good of our institution and we do wish and pray them God’s help as they work for the extension of God’s Kingdom here. Thank you very much indeed.

Finally there were the ‘few words of thanks’ on behalf of the County Grand Master, officers and members of County Donegal Grand Orange Lodge to all the brethren of the Grand Lodge of Ireland, county officers, district officers, sisters, today ‘for this grand and glorious day that we’re having here in Rossnowlagh’. There were thanks too to the ‘Reverend Brother’ who had conducted the service, to the giver of the ‘inspiring address’, to all the visiting lodges and bands who had attended, to County Grand Lodge for leading the parade, to the brethren of the district and the lodges for all their support and ‘heartfelt thanks to the Grand Master for visiting us, thanks to the ladies of Rossnowlagh, thanks to the owner of the land … we hope with God’s help that we’ll all be here next year … and may God bless you all and have a safe journey home and may we have a pleasant weekend’.

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Gerry and I walked back to the car park ahead of the parade. He had to file a report and I was rushing back to Northern Ireland to get the low-down on the latest negotiations over Drumcree.

8. Lurgan, 26 October 1997

It was Reformation Sunday. I had been held up in Belfast and had to drive at illegal speeds to get to Lurgan before the parade set off. I am vague about distances, but I realized I was getting close when soldiers, police and Land Rovers began to appear.

As I reached Lurgan and parked the car at the end of the main street, I could see a ceremony was in full swing. Denis Watson, the County Armagh Grand Master, and officials of the Lurgan male and female lodges were laying wreaths at the war memorial. Watching respectfully were twenty or thirty men in suits, a couple of dozen women in big Sunday hats and maybe twenty girls. All were wearing Orange collarettes.

Standing slightly to the side were the preacher for the day, the Reverend Brian Kennaway, and Graham Montgomery, who was holding, upside-down, a pile of six bowler hats, for those performing the remembrance ceremony needed to be bareheaded. Typically, despite the solemnity, I got an immediate smile and nod from Brian and Graham and the other three or four Orangemen I knew.

Only a couple of dozen locals watched this small parade walking to the annual Reformation Sunday service at Brownlow House, the headquarters of the Royal Black Institution, who share the Victorian Gothic building with their landlord, Lurgan Orange District. It was being rebuilt, having been damaged the previous year by petrol bombs on the day before the Apprentice Boys’ march in Derry. Many of the treasures of the Royal Black Institution were destroyed or damaged; it is costing about £8 million of public money (from the fund for compensation for terrorist damage) to repair and refurbish the house. The band, the Craigavon True Blues, seemed incongruous: they were a typical ‘blood-and-thunder’ band, containing young men one would rather avoid in a dark alley who wore bright blue uniforms and played the hymns like a call to battle. It is hard to avoid mixed feelings about these bands: on the one hand the macho, aggressive aura is off-putting; on the other, they’re wonderful to walk along with. That is why the republican bands that have emerged in the past decade or so are mirror-images of them.

So I walked along the pavement keeping pace with the band for the mile or so to Brownlow House. Here and there, a few residents came out of their houses and watched with the air of people pleased to have some diversion on a dull Sunday afternoon. We walked up the drive, someone opened the door and the members of the Orange Order went upstairs. The drummers wiped the perspiration from their faces and, along with the rest of the band, turned and went home.

Slightly ill-at-ease, although I had been invited, I followed the worshippers up the stairs and went to the back of the room. Many knew I’m from a Catholic background, and some of them even knew I’m an atheist, and I was nervous that my presence might therefore be offensive to some of them. But I was overlooking the determined hospitality of the rural Orangeman.

(#ulink_5931a962-c2be-5c79-9d8a-3d2c2e9e5b61) Denis Watson summoned me to the front bench, where I sat between Graham and a man I had met before, who gave me a big grin and said with heavy irony: ‘That was a very offensive parade, wasn’t it?’ It wasn’t the moment to tell him that you wouldn’t have to be neurotic or republican to find the Craigavon True Blues a bit much. The Worshipful Master of the lodge then removed my anxieties by making a kind reference to me in his opening remarks. I realized then that Orangemen are as unselfconscious about welcoming you to their worship as to their houses.

Brian Kennaway is a Presbyterian minister whose religious belief he describes as being ‘expressed in the simplicity of the Gospel recovered at the Reformation of the sixteenth century. That simple biblical religious belief affirms that salvation can only be achieved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, revealed to us in the scriptures alone.’ For someone from the Roman Catholic tradition, the Calvinist dismissal of good works as an aid to salvation is always disconcerting, but Kennaway makes it clear that if you have faith, ‘good works will follow as evidence’. He quotes William Fenner: ‘Good works are a good sign of faith but a rotten basis for faith.’

I’d sung more hymns in the last couple of years than I had in the rest of my life and I’d become pretty expert at ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’ and ‘Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus’, but I didn’t know three of the robust hymns that Kennaway had chosen. However, a large Orangeman was valiantly playing the tunes on a tiny electronic keyboard and I sang along as best I could.

Kennaway took as his biblical text 2 Chronicles 34, where King Josiah deals with false gods by having their altars broken down and their carved and molten images broken in pieces. As he read to us of the burning of the bones of the idolatrous priests upon their altars, Graham grinned at me broadly. (At the end of the service I went up to Kennaway and asked genially: ‘Brian, when you go off to lynch the priests, can I come too?’ He looked at me in horror and said, ‘Surely you didn’t think I meant …’ and then laughed when he realized I was pulling his leg.)

It was a very instructive service for me, for Kennaway is evangelical and radical as well as very intelligent. Of all the services I’ve been to, it was from this that I learned most about what religious Orangemen truly believe and why the Reformation is so immediate to them. It was an exemplary service, too, in its clarity and homely informality.

Kennaway was determined to show his audience of old and young, and many shades of Protestantism, why they owed gratitude to God for giving men like Calvin, Knox, Luther, Wyclif and Zwingli and their successors ‘all the gifts of understanding so that they translated your word into the common language of the people of the day … We thank you that your work is not static or stagnant: it is a living word.’

He gave thanks that ‘the word lives by your spirit in the hearts and lives of men and women and boys and girls,’ and wished that it would ‘really live in the hearts and lives of our people throughout this island.’

His sermon was about the relevance of his Old Testament text to the sixteenth-century Reformation.

We are here today to give thanks to God for the Protestant Reformation. And we make no apology for doing precisely that. Because we have everything to give thanks to God for in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. We do so today, because this is the nearest Sunday to the last day of the month, because it was on the 31st of October 1517 that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door at Wurtemberg … There was nothing particularly dramatic in this nailing theses or statements or propositions to the church door. There were no newspapers. Indeed if you go to any university today you’ll see noticeboards and all sorts of announcements and notices nailed to those noticeboards. That was a simple way that Martin Luther had of drawing attention to issues which concerned him.

Not all the theses were worth reading, he pointed out, and read out some that were, several of which were about the ‘the over-enthusiastic sale of indulgences or letters of pardon from the pope’. There was some more about what was owed to Luther’s successors and then he came to the heart of his homily:

It seems to me that we’re very good at drawing parallels in our local situation in Ulster to other situations in the world, but we’re not so good when it comes to drawing parallels to our spiritual situation in Ulster with spiritual situations in the scriptures. And for that reason I wanted to draw the parallel today because the problem of Ancient Judea is exactly the same as the problem of Ulster. It’s spiritual. Brethren and sisters, you had better believe it.

The answer therefore to the problems of Ulster is not a new political initiative. The answer to the problems of Ulster is a spiritual initiative, because the problems are fundamentally and basically spiritual problems. May I quote words spoken a few weeks ago by the County Grand Chaplain, William Bingham, when he addressed a fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference:

‘As I look around Britain today, I look at the situation not only as an Orangeman, and an Ulsterman, but as a Christian – indeed a Christian minister. I am committed to Orangeism, but I am supremely committed to Christ. I recognize that my approach to religion – indeed many people’s approach to religion in Northern Ireland – is out of tune with the times in England but I do feel passionately that Christ and the gospel has provided the answer to the deepest needs of society and that peace and reconciliation begin at the Cross.’

The parallel with ancient Israel, Kennaway went on, was that

every time she went wrong spiritually, she went wrong politically. Every time she went after other gods, she lost her political battles … We are in danger of becoming a race merely of political Protestants … if we get away from the centrality of the word of God …

I believe in the principles of the loyal Orange institution, but I wonder do we all believe in these principles? … We have to make sure that our principles and our practice run parallel … I cannot help but fear that will ultimately be our downfall. We will become political Protestants and we will abandon our biblical principles. You see as I often say to groups of Orangemen and I make no apology for saying it again and saying it here: ‘If you are involved in something or you’re doing something which you know in your heart of hearts is out of keeping with the principles of scripture, then do, I beg you, not only for your soul’s sake – and that’s far more important than anything else – but for the sake of the institution which you profess to love, change your ways or resign.’

Oh, we have great principles, we have noble principles, but our condemnation will be when the world points the finger at us and asks where is our practice? Our principles and our practice ought to be the same. Do we want to see change? Do we really want God to bless us? Do we really want God to intervene in a situation in Ulster where if we are honest with ourselves we know it is only God’s intervention that can save us … People like to draw parallels to our present crises to the turn of the century – the Home Rule crisis – but some things are different, you know. And you’d better believe it. You see God played a more significant part in our nation at the beginning of the century. People were fundamentally more religious. And when they sang the words of that hymn we sang – ‘O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come’, they actually meant it. Do we? What’s the answer?

The answer is reformation and revival under the anointing of the spirit of God.

After we had sung the final hymn – a setting of the 46th psalm about God our trusty shield who makes wars cease – and, of course, the national anthem, and most people had left, Kennaway anxiously questioned those of us remaining about whether he had got his message through. Had he been direct enough? Always, my biggest culture shock when I go to the Ulster Protestant heartlands from London or Dublin, is once again to realize to what extent they say what they mean and mean what they say. It is no wonder they have such difficulty with the English desire to fudge and the southern Irish desire to please everyone.

A few of us stayed on for a chat and they showed me some more of the damaged Brownlow House. I asked about the band and was told that it was regarded as a major breach of Orange etiquette that its members had not come to the service. They shouldn’t, said one of them, be hired if they weren’t prepared to participate in the religious part of the proceedings. There was criticism, too, of the martial way in which they had banged out the hymn tunes. But one of the Orangemen shrugged. ‘What can you do? There are only two local bands and they’re both blood-and-thunder, because that’s what the young men like, and there’ll be bad feeling if we don’t hire locals.’ ‘If necessary,’ said Brian Kennaway, who is notorious for not suffering gladly either fools or yobs, ‘we could dispense with a band and parade down the road whistling.’

So once again, another own goal by decent Protestants and another example of the how perception and reality are at odds where the Orange Order is concerned. Here was a service attended by believing Christians, who listened intently to the message that they should live their lives as witnesses to God. Most of these people are the salt of the earth. But because they hire the local band, an outsider observing their parade could well have gone away with an image of drum-beating bigots.

A Cancellation, 9 August 1997

I was over from London for the Apprentice Boys’ parade which was to take place the next day, when just before midnight came the news that the Newtownbutler Residents’ Association was determined to block a small Black parade through the town early the following morning. So Mark and I decided to go there before we went to Derry.

The situation in Newtownbutler was particularly sad. Despite tragedies like Enniskillen and all the border murders, Fermanagh Protestants are notoriously less bigoted than those of any other Northern Ireland county. Newtownbutler had a cross-community historical society and a Thursday Club for the elderly and prided itself on its harmoniousness. As one resident put it in the summer of 1996: ‘When there was a death both communities attended the wake house and the funeral.’ And a local SDLP politician told a journalist that cooperation was the norm: ‘It’s the so-called sick-cow syndrome. It doesn’t matter if it is a Protestant or a Catholic cow. I remember once there was a cow in distress and the owner was away. A neighbour called to borrow something on the farm and saw the cow and called in others and by the time the calf was born, the DUP, the UUP, Sinn Féin and the SDLP had been there to help. That cooperation is there yet, but it is most definitely under threat.’

It was Drumcree Two and the subsequent boycotting of Protestant businesses that had made the difference. Within two months of Drumcree, Catholics and Protestants were boycotting alike and sectarian tensions had provided fertile ground for the establishment of a Newtownbutler Area Residents’ Association to try to block parades.

By August 1997 Newtownbutler was radicalized and no Catholic residents were prepared or able to challenge the Residents’ Association, which was able to swell its ranks when necessary by bringing in reinforcements from outside. What caused particular offence to Protestants were the protesters from the nearby town of Clones, in County Monaghan in the Irish Republic.

Mark and I arrived around 7 a.m. in Newtownbutler to find a group of disconsolate young men. Some of them had just arrived, a few were still arriving and others had been up all night fearful that the police would seal off the main street. Some of them seemed drunk. Not long before they had been told that the Blackmen had cancelled their parade. A smashed window was testimony to their frustration.

We walked up to the top of the village and then back to the bottom because I was shivering and Mark had a sweater in the car. A few RUC men arrived and took up their position at the top of the main street, well away from the protesters. They were in good humour because, as they confirmed, the parade had been cancelled. They would not have to face insults, stones, petrol bombs and maybe worse.

We wandered back to the protesters and found that some of them were still deeply reluctant to believe this had happened. It might be a cunning ploy. It might be that if the protesters left, the Blackmen would arrive and stage their parade after all. I couldn’t help. These were cross young men. It was not a gathering where one could explain that the Royal Black Institution didn’t approve of telling lies.

Protesters stood around grumbling for a while and then matters were enlivened by the arrival of a red-headed American woman in army boots who engaged the residents’ leader in conversation for the next fifteen minutes or so. Mark and I stood by fascinated, for here in the flesh was the living embodiment of the Noraid