Days of Thunder

History moves so slowly, you could weep. Here’s a column I wrote in The Irish News on 11 July 2002.

Few things unite myself and William of Orange.

I’m not of royal blood, I don’t have long curly hair and I’m not gay. But there is one thing we have in common – the Twelfth of July. That’s the date he did the drum business a big favour and that’s the date I was born.

 I sometimes tell people I was 14 before I realised the bands weren’t for me, but that’s not strictly true. In fact it’s a lie. My earliest memories are of ducking behind tree trunks and peering through the long grass as the flutes and bowler hats went thudding up the Derry Road to Omagh. This looked less like a celebration and more like a preparation for a battle of some kind. That impression was reinforced in the afternoon. We’d barely have finished the birthday  ice cream and jelly when a series of crashing sounds would come from the back of our hayshed.

Youngsters from the Protestant housing estate that abutted our land had begun their traditional Twelfth practice of reminding the taigs next door of who was who and what was what. For half an hour or more the tattoo would continue until we could stand no more.  My sisters and I would run to take up position just out of stone range where we’d stand and seethe.”This is Sandy Row where the fenians never go!” they’d yell, lobbing another stone. They had the advantage, throwing from higher ground down towards us, but we did what we could to respond. And when arms grew tired we’d share information about the Queen’s toilet habits, the Pope’s sex life and what King Billy’s relationship was with his horse.

In some ways I could understand the afternoon insults better than the morning marching.For me celebration was when you got cards and grub and presents.What was so good about having to spend hours playing a musical instrument and marching in step at the same time?

What, for that matter, was the point in all that marching for the Twelfth?

 More than fifty years later I still haven’t got a satisfactory answer. The nearest people with Orange sympathies come is “It’s part of the Protestant/Unionist tradition”. Not good enough, I’m afraid. Because something has been done for a long time doesn’t mean it’s necessarily beautiful.

 For centuries the United States had a tradition of bringing black people in chains from Africa to the New World, where they were worked mercilessly in the cotton plantations of the South. The tradition was defended by references to the Bible and it took a bitter civil war before it was abolished .In eighteenth and even nineteenth-century England, there was a tradition of sending children up chimneys to clean them – not a happy or healthy way to spend your childhood. Again, time has consigned that tradition to the dust-bin.

 And as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, a day is coming when decent Protestant people will see the Orange Order as presently constituted for what it is – an anti-Catholic organisation – and the marches, the speeches, the party tunes will be identified as the  drum-thudding displays of arroganc that they are, designed to upset and provoke their Catholic neighbours.

That’s not to say the memory of William of Orange should not be maintained and honoured  if that’s how you see history. It could even be combined with a good day out. Much is made by Orange brethren of the pleasures of the field: sunshine, ice-cream, a bottle of stout, a chat with neighbours and old friends. Indeed, in which case logic suggests getting to the field as quickly as possible, rather than forming ranks to march past Catholic churches or Catholic neighbourhoods with ‘The Sash’ or ‘Dolly’s Brae’ at full volume. 

Yes, 1690 was a famous victory. But it was also 312 years ago.There can’t be a person on the island of Ireland who isn’t sick seeing replays of that famous England victory in the 1966 World Cup, and that was only 36 years ago.We don’t mind the English being happy they won, but we do wish they’d stop shoving it down our throats again and again. Ditto for William and the Boyne.

 As for me, I’ll be spending the day quietly, trying not to get depressed  and occasionally ringing the Irish News to check  that the room set aside to receive readers’ presents is big enough.