THE sight of the Orange Order pontificating on the local media is an odd one, when you take a step back and think about it. It has spent the past few months organising parades which feature bands supporting loyalist paramilitaries and bands which bang out viciously anti-Catholic songs, and yet it reacts hysterically when it’s called out.
But it’s not as odd a sight as the same media which the Orange Order complains about continuing to platform the Order as if it were a political party, a government agency, a quango, a sporting group or a community group. It is anything but.
What it is is a post-medieval religious sub-sect whose raison d’être is nominally the promotion of the reformed faith, but which publicly and vocally at every turn shows itself to be ten times more interested in the denigration of the Catholic faith.
Nothing intrinsically wrong with that. There are quaint, unusual and sometimes objectionable interest groups all over the place, many of them religious. But they are all treated as exactly what they are. The Orange Order, on the other hand, retains the gravitas and authority bestowed upon it by the unionist media during the long, grey years of one-party unionist rule at Stormont. Which is to say, their thoughts and views are sought and platformed all year round on a wide range of subjects – political, social, cultural, sporting – with a regularity that is quite frankly baffling to those of us whose hearts don’t swell with pride at the thump of the year’s first Lambeg or the sight of the first row of stolen pallets to rise above the rooftops.
The extraordinarily long, detailed, self-pitying and bitter statement issued by the Grand Lodge this week didn’t receive the guffaws of derision that it would in any normal society – it won them another invitation to talk about why they’re sad and another chance to name and berate those who are making them sad, who happen to be the very people who are doing the interviewing. What we then had was a legacy media version of the online meme featuring Spider-Man twins circling each other aggressively and suspiciously.
The Orange Order is essentially an over-promoted historical re-enactment society. Their events and rituals might justifiably be reported on occasionally in the feature sections, with appropriate reminders of their monocultural nature. But down through their 50 glory years as the Stormont shadow government, and the subsequent 50 years of their struggle to adapt to their straitened circumstances in a rapidly changing political environment, they have remained on speed dial in newsrooms across the North.
True, the Orange Order is robustly questioned today in a way that it never was before, and in a way that it clearly despises. But it has no place in the daily news, print or broadcast. It is high time its media status matched its reality. Come the end of every angry summer it should be put away with the garden furniture and the barbecue.
