A History of Ireland in Song

Orange Order

The Orange Order defines itself as "a Protestant fraternity". Their name is in memory of King William III, Prince of Orange, a Dutchman who, to simplify things greatly, became King of England after fighting for it with a Scotsman, James II. The decisive battle of this struggle was at the Boyne, which the Order commemorates to this day every 12th of July. The Order itself was founded in Armagh in 1795, in response to the similar Catholic organisation "the Defenders". The destructive fire of religious hatred spread across Ulster in that period: a fire kindled and fanned by the British, according to the age-old principle of divide et impera, as one means of fighting the United Irishmen. During the 19th Century the Order spread to all parts of Ireland and become synonymous with reaction and loyalty to the English crown. It played a major role nation-wide in the movement against Home Rule in the latter half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, but the seat of its power was always in Ulster. Today, there are lodges in many parts of the world, but in the main the movement is concentrated in the six counties.

One of the most telling examples of the Orange Order's baleful influence on modern Irish politics was during the Great Depression years of the 1930s. In Belfast, unemployed workers, Protestant and Catholic, united in demonstrations demanding that something be done to ease their plight. The Order acted swiftly to break up the movement by inciting the Protestant mob to sectarian rioting, thus quickly obscuring the real issue and destroyed that nascent union between Irishmen of different creeds which had threatened the power structure of the province. And so it has ever been. At times of civil disturbance, the Order becomes a savage instrument of reaction: "burnings, lootings and shootings bestrew its unlovely history" as Tim Pat Coogan put it.

Orangemen should be distinguished from Unionists per se, although it is true that until recently, membership of the Order was a sine qua non for any Unionist politician in the six counties. However, Irish Unionism is essentially a political doctrine that spans any "religious divide": many Irish Catholics have been Unionists; conversely, many Irish Protestants have been Nationalists and indeed Republicans. In contrast, the root and branch of Orange-ism, its raison d'être, is anti-Catholicism. Logically, though perhaps not in practice, this essential doctrine leads to elimination, just as anti-Semitism did in Nazi Germany. After all, if you believe that Catholic men, women and children will burn in the fires of Hell if they do not convert to the true faith, why not anticipate the event: petrol-bomb their homes, burn them out of your streets, and, ultimately, kill them and let God sort them out?

Q. What do

b) William of Orange;
a) John Knox;
c) Ulrich Zwingli and
d) John Calvin

all have in common apart from being major Protestant leaders?

A. None of them could have been members of any Loyal Orange Order since they were either born Catholics who converted or one or more of their parents were Catholics.

Now, there are just two organisations that I know of in Europe of recent times that have forbade membership to those whose grandmother was the wrong religion. One is, as we've just seen, the Orange Order; the other was the German SS.

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