IT is of zero importance to BBCNI, UTV, the Belfast Telegraph and the News Letter that the Orange Order literally exists because it doesn’t like the Church of Rome. Every year the broadcasters do happy-clappy round-ups of parades across the North, studiously avoiding those aspects of the parades that ensure the pubs of Donegal and the beaches of Benidorm are packed in July.
The editing required to turn out copious air hours and endless columns free of the dodgy stuff is Olympic standard, because the dodgy stuff is everywhere. You’ve the bands churning out hateful, anti-Catholic party tunes.You’ve got the bands actually and literally named after yer UFF and UDA characters.You’ve got the Homeric drinking, which in Belfast reaches its apotheosis among the heaving, sweating, guldering crowds in Sandy Row, Bradbury Place and the lower Lisburn Road. Not only would you not take a child by the hand through the drink-sodden, marijuana-scented, foul-mouthed chaos of that area on the Twelfth, you’d think twice before taking a unit of Navy Seals in full combat gear through it.
But of all these key features of the Belfast Twelfth there's no sign in the evening TV specials and the multi-page newspaper pull-outs the next morning. What you will see is smiling women in union jack cowboy hats, possibly tipsy but never three bottles of Buckie in. What you will see is elderly people in deck chairs drinking tea from tartan flasks and eating sandwiches neatly wrapped in tinfoil. What you will see is toddlers with red, white and blue tin drums performing for their doting parents. What you won’t seen is Sandy Row/Bradbury place. What you won’t see is so much as a single bottle of blue WKD. What you won’t see is a loyalist paramilitary killer on a banner.
PRIVILEGED: When Orangemen walk where they're not wanted, they prefer not to bring along the laydeez
What you’ll hear is How Great Thou Art, Shall We Gather at the River and – at a push and in meagre portions – The Sash or Derry’s Walls. What you won’t hear is The Famine Song (aka The Sloop John B), The Billy Boys (aka The One About Blood and Fenians) and No Pope of Rome (aka Pope Francis Died Ha Ha Ha).
The BelTel and the News Letter have it easy, relatively speaking. The photographers are sent out with a brief to by-ball the unpleasantness and anything that is inadvertently captured – a bandsman pissing against a chapel, a stray two-litre bottle of Olde English – are easily cropped out. Pity the poor BBC Ulster and UTV editors, however. They’ve to trawl through a huge amount of footage from all over the place, sighing and clipping as they go, ever alert to the slightest Twelfth contraindication. And they have to do it in time for the evening special. There's got to be a Bafta in that if they can find the right category.
So we’ve established not only that the majority of our media outlets are gloriously unbothered by the Twelfth’s Catholic problem, but that they go to considerable lengths to cover it up. We move on then to ask ourselves whether it might not be more profitable for those of us who think the summer might be better without asbestos boneys and Catholic-slashing singalongs to consider whether BBCNI, UTV, the BelTel and the News Letter might not be more moved and concerned by another targeted cohort: Women.
Because women aren’t allowed in the Orange Order. If you say that, as I have on many occasions, you’ll get – as I have on many occasions – the same response every time: That’s not true. But it is true.
Sure, there’s an organisation that women can join that is vaguely linked to the Orange Order. The Association of Loyal Orangewomen of Ireland is a satellite organisation in which women are free to make tray bakes and unfeasibly large pots of tea; they can wash and iron sashes; polish medals; darn shabby banners; hell, they can even walk on the Twelfth if they’re so minded. But not with the men. ‘You walk over there, love, go easy in them high heels and maybe head back early to get the kettle on.’
And of course, they’re not allowed within an ass’s roar of the Grand Lodge, the Orange Order’s controlling and decision-making body. There are no women on the key 18-man Central Committee of the Grand Lodge, the holy of holies where the big decisions are made (the clue’s in the phrase ’18-man’). And there are no women in the 373-man Grand Lodge proper.
If being obsessed with Catholics and Catholicism isn’t enough to persuade our modern media that a rethink is required over their love affair with the bowler-hatted ones, shouldn’t the exclusion of women lead to a reimagining of the Orange Order’s inclusion in our celebratory calendar? I assume that women work on the Twelfth newspaper supplements. And I can only take it for granted that women are in the BBC and UTV editing suites when the don’t-scare-the-horses specials are being compiled. What do those women journalists think of inviting us to join them in three hurrahs for an organisation that won’t have them about the place? And even more to the point, what do Catholic women journalists think?
Will they continue to keep quiet and knit, as the Orange ladies do? Or will they say something about it?
