The 2020 marching season will be remembered as one of the least polarising in living memory.
Pandemic life completely overshadowed preparations for Orangeism’s big day, with a positive side effect being a significant reduction in community tensions. Most of the arches and flags annually erected in mixed areas in the months and weeks leading up to the Twelfth remained in storage, but bonfires still provided a source of agitation.
The volume and height of these pyres may have been considerably reduced this year, but the poisonous messages associated with them was the same, not least the KAT (Kill All Taigs) graffiti prominently scrawled on a children’s bonfire and others mocking the passing of Bobby Storey. The decision to locate a bonfire at a north Belfast interface was a needless provocation and one which should have invited vocal opposition from within unionism and the loyal orders. Alas, no such voices were raised.
Arlene Foster once labelled a bonfire including a scrawled message mocking the death of loyalist firebrand Willie Frazer as a “tower of hate”. She was right, but unionist leaders are not as quick to affix that same label to Eleventh Night bonfires which annually burn any and every item remotely associated with Irishness or Catholicism.
Wallace Thompson, an Orangeman and founding member of the DUP, stepped forward last week to deliver a stinging attack on loyalist bonfires, noting that with few exceptions these contain “sinister displays of naked sectarian hatred.”
The Orange Order was widely and rightly commended for calling off its marches on account of the continuing pandemic, but addressing the elephant in the room requires getting to grips with the territory-claiming antics and toxic bonfire culture which continue to be inextricably linked with its organisation.
That’s a difficult ask for an outfit which has long sought to define itself by what it has been against.
100 years ago, Edward Carson’s incendiary speech at the Belfast Twelfth demonstration in Finaghy provided the spark for the pogroms against Belfast’s minority Catholic population.
Equality has come dropping painfully slow to this part of Ireland, and the order has led the way in resisting the north’s new departure, regularly picking the losing side, winning only pyrrhic victories along the way. The most spectacular of these was at Drumcree, when the order helped seal the fate of the RUC and drove thousands of unionists forever beyond the reach of Orangeism. Yet still the brethren turn up to protest at Drumcree hill.
The order remains unionism’s legion of the rearguard. It opposed the Good Friday Agreement, decried reforms to policing and has most recently taken a stand against legislative provision for the Irish language in this part of Ireland.
Not without irony, its greatest ire is reserved for a Parades Commission that has been central to defusing tensions associated with Orange parades for the betterment of all in society.
Every year, the order celebrates as a victory for civil and religious liberties battles from three centuries ago which led directly to the Penal Laws and subjugation of the overwhelming majority of Irish people for more than a century. It exists in an irony free world, never more so than when accusing others of rewriting history.
Yet Orangeism will not disappear, and nor should it.
We all have a past and no monopoly on suffering nor prejudice. Orangeism continues to flounder because its leaders won’t heed the lessons of history. But the Orange tradition will always have ground upon which to stand. Ahead of the Twelfth this year, a nationalist tweeted about how, after his father died in May, members of the local Orange lodge delivered a food hamper and sympathy card to the house for his grieving mother and lined the street as the funeral passed through the village.
The BBC cameras no longer head to Finaghy (Irish for ‘white field’) for Belfast’s Twelfth. The demographics have long since changed there, though loyalists annually choose to agitate by erecting flags of more loyal colours at Finaghy crossroads, a futile protest against the irreversible tide of change.
The pandemic, and the order's response to it, improved community relations throughout the Twelfth period this year. It remains to be seen if unionism and Orangeism possess leaders with the vision to try and build on this for the years ahead to finally bring the order in from the cold.
