The chronology hardly matters.
Up popped something disgusting filmed inside an Orange hall while citizens, almost certainly including devoted monarchists, booed Britain’s prime minister on his way to pay tribute to Britain’s aged queen.
Who stayed home and watched the television like her subjects. Or it happened the other way around; disgusting Orangery revealed before the boos. Like it or not, both events have significance.
Many want to hear nothing about Orange or queen. But however trivial the stuff about royals not meeting each others’ eyes, a reign effectively ending in front of her subjects and the monarch herself is a story. Even though we’re talking about a 96-year-old who appeared sturdy, resilient, chugging through new widowhood. She did have Covid in February. ‘Mild, cold-like symptoms,' the official statement said then; Her Majesty would still be carrying out 'light duties'. A few months on here she is cancelling appearances and looking more her age; one effect of the virus, as I am here to tell you.
Though maybe it was easier to call in sick the second and third time; get the footman to put the TV on, pour the Dubonnet and gin, say the hell with the lot of them. Right on cue out came the footage of drinking visitors in Dundonald Orange Hall - while elsewhere it was ‘we love the Queen on the Shankill.’ (Said a woman being served tea at a table in the City Hall by the new Sinn Féin mayor.)
These days there is scant chance of avoiding the most unpleasant public or even semi-public exchanges. This one came out courtesy (wrong word) of a participant so pleased with himself and mates that he filmed the show and put it on Facebook. Where the less impressed discovered it smartish.
So much was bewildering; target, lack of humour. Not so much the cruelty, tastelessness, misogyny and what had to be a fundamental, animating hatred of Catholics. What bewildered was the self-publicising, the transparent attempt at self-protection, resort to loyalism’s most publicised though unelected figurehead to produce something posing as an apology. Mainly ‘don’t take it out on our families’ and give us a break, plus the newish refrain; ‘this does not reflect who we are.’
The three identified as Orangemen did the order a favour by resigning – which never got round to expelling most brethren convicted of Troubles violence. Or Davy Tweed. The will of the majority? To judge from the sound, nobody in the Dundonald gathering interrupted. Nobody shouted stop.
This crowd, some women, mostly men, was well bonded before the song which many clearly knew. Well, it wasn’t for the women present to try shaming them. To do that in a crowd, even a smaller group, is beyond most of us. Hard among strangers, maybe even harder among friends and neighbours. It’s part of what keeps comparatively decent men quiet while someone tells a pornographic joke about a woman or women. Ramp up that difficulty with the clubbiness, the bonds of an Orange hall.
Make an imaginative effort if Orange halls are foreign territory. Think; you’re in a place you know well, among familiar faces. On the way home from a game or late at night someone shouts ‘Up the Ra’. At a country wake someone sings a fine old Troubles blood-stirrer with an anti-Brit, anti-Hun chorus. Less offensive than loyalist sectarian songs?
It took little time after the initial spate of condemnation, as ever, for someone to say hey, the GAA never discipline their people after pro-IRA singing on buses. Though clubs have been fined. And Michelle O’Neill did publicly reprove her female MLAs who when younger texted ugly and crude references to ‘Huns’, other women, various public figures. They apologised too, and are forgiven. The most outspoken texter took over 14,000 first preferences last month.
People used to enmity particularly appreciate solidarity. Faded now for Boris, who brought his own boos.
