THERE will come a time in the future when we look back at the active role that the Orange Order played in the great partition experiment, shake our heads and ask ourselves if that really happened. Just when the centrality to our public life of the loyal orders and their hyper-sensitivity to the smell of Mass and the rattle of rosary beads will be seen as the sectarian travesty that it was is not clear.
Will I live to see a time when people will shake their heads and puff their cheeks out at the very idea that a bunch of mostly elderly men who don’t like the Church of Rome were valued as commentators by both the print and broadcast media? Or will I shuffle off this mortal coil having lived my entire life – like my parents – in a place where not liking someone’s religion earns you not derision and ostracisation but a place on a TV panel discussion and on the speed-dial list of political journalists?
I suspect the inevitable future conversation will be between not me and my children, but between my children and their children.
– So you’re telling me that the city closed down for two weeks every summer for a mob of blokes brought together by a mutual dislike of Catholics?
– Oh, yeah.
– That’s mad. And you’re telling me that there were celebratory TV specials?
– Of course. And colourful newspaper supplements.
– Was that legal?
– It was. But to be fair towards the end they didn’t show the marches live like they did in your granda’s time. They just did happy-clappy evening round-ups which ignored the awkward Catholic bits.
Much as I’m appalled and gobsmacked in equal measure by the durability of the Orange Order’s post-medieval product, I don’t believe that it can have no place in any new political dispensation. On the contrary, I think one of the key tests of whatever polity is formed from the big bang of the union’s collapse is whether Catholics, or cultural Catholics like me, have it in them to display magnanimity towards an ethos that did them down for over a century.
But in any new compact between a reconfigured civic society and the many hoary old agencies looking to be a part of it, old clauses will be struck out. And for the Orange Order, that means if they want to continue to walk through the centre of a majority Catholic city like Belfast, they are going to have to take responsibility for and own up to – finally – for exactly what it is that they bring on to the streets. Because the time for talking out of both sides of that jowly mouth will be over. The time will be no more when the Orange Order can harrumph and say “Nothing to do with us, Declan” when bearded about the reality of their main parade.
And the reality of that main parade, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention down through the decades, is that it is chock-full of UDA and UVF bands; UDA and UVF bands that the Orange Order actively welcomes to its Day of Days. That welcome doesn’t have to be entirely withdrawn for I don’t care if the Orange Order or the Black or the Apprentice Boys want to parade with their swords and gloves and bowlers behind paramilitary fanboy bands on the Shankill, in Sandy Row, in Ballybeen or Glencairn.
MESSAGE: The Shankill Star band’s uniform features a badge that’s a tribute to the notorious UVF killer Brian Robinson 
Knock yourselves out, lads, because people there will either be in favour of that kind of thing or at least willing to keep quiet about it; and it’s unlikely (but far from a given) that victims of UDA and UVF killers will be present to get upset.
Here's the flagrant sectarianism that the Orange Order gets away with every year on the Twelfth: It’s their parade; they put out the invites; it’s entirely up to them who marches, who plays and who doesn’t. And year after year who is welcomed along to march? Bands literally named after loyalist Catholic-killers and thugs, that’s who. Granted, their numbers are relatively small, but in there among the bands from up the country who do their accordion practice in tin-roof gospel halls are the Rising Sons of Lennie Murphy’s Madder Brother, or whatever deliberately and brutally inflammatory killer they have decided to name on their colourful drums and uniforms (some paid for by the Arts Council).
Big events like the Twelfth aren’t easy to marshal. It’s too late now to do anything about the elite-level drinking, for instance, because it’s woven into the very fabric of the day and stopping bandsmen from necking beer and spirits on a Lisburn Road rest break would be next to impossible; persuading the spectators to give up the blue bags, meanwhile, would be harder than controlling the Twelfth weather. But with a single email the Orange Order could this very day put a stop to the glorification of loyalist killers by bands who have their names either in their title, on their uniforms, on their drums, or all three. The Orange boasts of its bona fides as a non-sectarian, peaceful religious order, but the Twelfth reality tells a very different story.
The PSNI at this moment has zero interest in taking action against people publicly supporting proscribed paramilitary groups, although they have summoned up a tremendous amount of enthusiasm to snap the cuffs on Palestine Action supporters. But there will come a time when the pressure on the police to act is irresistible, and as the organisers of the event where displays of support for the UVF and UDA are legion, the Orange Order will be in the frame when the time finally comes to answer and explain.
Of course there will be little or no appetite in the upper echelons of the Orange to clean up its act when it comes to public displays of support for Catholic-killers and the reasons for a reluctance to act can even be understandable. There’s little doubt that a loyal order fatwah on UVF and UDA bands would provoke significant unrest both within the Orange Order and within the huge numbers of people who turn out on the Twelfth, and with the Orange Order having been in significant decline for some time, a self-inflicted round of infighting is not going to help. But the choice is clear for the brethren: Clean up your act or one way or another it’s going to be cleaned up for you.
