Good News: play promises to sweep away shibboleths surrounding Orange Order

I see that a new play has been touring the Derry area recently. It’s called “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way from the Twelfth” and is a comedy. It will, the Londonderry Sentinel promises, attempt to “break down some of the shibboleths” around the Orange culture.

A shibboleth, my dictionary tells me, is “a custom, principle or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.” So it’s clearly a play that could be very helpful in sweeping away false notions about the Orange Order.

Here are just five of the many shibboleths I’m hoping  the play will chuck out:

Shibboleth 1: The Orange Order was founded as a religious organization to celebrate the Protestant faith. This particular shibboleth is contradicted by the historical facts, which show that the Order was founded as a brotherhood to maintain the Protestant Ascendancy. History also tells us that the Order was formed in the immediate aftermath of a sectarian clash in which at least thirty Catholics were killed.

Shibboleth 2: The Orange Order stands for freedom of religion. This risible claim is just a bit undermined by the Order’s birth on the corpses of some thirty Catholics and the tooth-and-nail fight the Order put up to prevent Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

Sibboleth 3: The Orange Order is essentially a religious, not a political organization. This shibboleth got a kick in the teeth when the Rev Mervyn Gibson formed part of the DUP delegation to the Haas talks. Mr Gibson, before becoming Grand Master of the Orange Order, was a member of the RUC Special Branch, which many would say leaned just a little towards right-wing unionist politics. There can be no denying that Protestantism is a strand of the Orange Order tapestry (I mean, come on), but the political strand isn’t just captured in the Rev Mervyn Gibson but also in the fact that for decades, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland was, with dreary predictability, a member of the Orange Order.

Shibboleth 4: Any disorder associated with Orange marches has always come from intolerant nationalist/republican protestors. A quick read through Andy Boyd’s Holy War in Belfast shows that where there were Orange parades, civil disorder followed as day follows night. So bellicose was the Order in the nineteenth century, the British government had to ban it from 1823-45. In 1835, a Parliamentary Committee heard this from Armagh local magistrate William Handcock:

“For some time past the peacable inhabitants of the parish of Drumcree have been insulted and outraged by large bodies of Orangemen parading the highways, playing party tunes, firing shots, and using the most opprobrious epithets they could invent…a body of Orangemen marched through the town and proceeded to Drumcree Church, passing by the Catholic chapel though it was a considerable distance out of their way.”

And mark – this was during a period when the Order was banned. Clearly a peace-loving religious organization, then.

Shibboleth 5: The Orange Order is an outward-looking, progressive organization. A particularly difficult shibboleth  to sell, this one, since Orangemen opposed not just Catholic Emancipation in 1829, but also the Reform Act (1832), the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (1869) and the Ballot Act (1872). In short, if it meant things didn’t remain frozen in inequality, the Orange Order was agin it.

I’m beginning  to wonder how a short piece of drama like “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way from The Twelfth” is going  to cover even half of the walking-backwards shibboleths that cluster like malaria-carrying mosquitoes around the Orange Order.