With Orange Order hardliners losing the battle in their efforts to crank up the tension over the annual Drumcree stand-off, Northern Ireland looks set for the most peaceful July marching season in a decade. This would be a good time for Irish nationalism to rethink its history and especially its relationship with Orangeism. This is not to suggest that Irish history should be rewritten and that unpalatable elements and episodes discounted. Nationalists must lay claim to the marching season by promoting the Catholic tradition.
Just as St Patrick’s Day, March 17, is viewed as a nationalist holiday, so July 12 is seen as the Protestants’ “big day out”. Irish nationalists have also laid claim to the 1798 United Irishmen’s failed rebellion, even though many of its leaders were Protestant, and Irish Presbyterianism played a major role in this particular coup against the British crown.
Many Irish republicans want to see a united Ireland by 2016 – the centenary of the failed Dublin Easter Rising. But republicans seem to have conveniently forgotten about the significant role which Protestant nationalists played. The Easter Rising was not just a Roman Catholic rebellion, just as the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 was not simply a Unionist victory.
Nationalists have as much right to commemorate the Jacobite war in Ireland against William of Orange as Unionists do. The latter can shout about their heroes: Frederick, Duke of Schomberg, at the Boyne, and Godert de Ginkell, the Earl of Athlone, a year later in 1691 at the equally crucial battle of Aughri. But nationalists have their heroes, too. What about the ablest Irish military commander of the day, Patrick Sarsfield, the first Earl of Lucan, who brought the Williamite campaign to a grinding halt in Connaught? And what about the Dundalk-based Richard Talbot, the Earl of Tyrconnell, who in 1689 launched the Jacobite guerrilla force, the Rapparees, which hounded Schomberg’s troops with their hit-and-run tactics? Hundreds of years later, IRA chief Michael Collins was to base his lethal “flying columns” on the strategy of the Rapparees.
The Loyalist tune, “The Sash”, marks Williamite conquests at Derry, Aughrim, Enniskillen and the Boyne – but conveniently leaves out the routing of William’s militia at the Break of Dromore in County Down in March 1689. The hero that day was a Jacobite officer, Richard Hamilton.
And, let’s not forget, had it not been for King Billy’s predominantly Catholic elite troops, the Dutch Blues Guard, his father-in-law, King James, may have won the day at the Boyne. The annual “Sham Fight” on July 13, re-enacting the Battle of the Boyne, should perhaps be staged in the nationalist Swatragh village, rather than in the Unionist Scarva village in County Down, where it is currently held. Unionists mark that conflict as the “Glorious Revolution”, but what about the Treaty of Limerick, negotiated by Sarsfield, who by that time had forced William, into a humiliating corner, politically and militarily?
The marching season sees the traditional Loyalist “Kick The Pope” flute bands out in force. However, in 1690, Pope Alexander VIII ordered a special Te Deum to celebrate William’s Boyne victory.
The Boyne was actually part of the Nine Years’ War, also called the War of the League of Augsburg, which saw Protestant England and Holland side with Catholic Spain and the papacy to fight Louis of France. Even after King Billy left Ireland to fight Louis in Europe, the Irish Catholic gentry formed the “Patriot Parliament” to undo the effects on Oliver Cromwell’s land conquests on the island.
While Unionists adopt a broad north Antrim accent they like to describe as “Ulster Scots”, nationalists have laid claim to the Irish language.
For many years, an Orange lodge, Ireland’s Heritage, marched with an Irish Gaelic motto on its banner. The lodge was later disbanded after child abuser William McGrath – the “Beast of Kincora” – was revealed to be leading member. McGrath also ran a Loyalist terror gang, the Tara.
A hardline fundamentalist, he was convicted of sexually abusing young boys in his care at the notorious Kincora Boys Home in east Belfast. Perhaps conveniently for some, McGrath died of cancer some years ago. He was suspected of being a British intelligence agent. There have been allegations since McGrath was jailed that British intelligence knew about the sexual abuse, but decided to let it continue so that information could be gathered about homosexuals in the Unionist community.
The Roman Catholic Church globally, but especially in Ireland, is facing a massive social backlash because of clerics being exposed as child abusers. With Kincora, unionism has its own child abuse nightmare.
At long last, though, nationalists are recognising the sacrifice of thousands of Catholics who fought and died for Britain in two world wars and other global conflicts. Nationalists now need to take a further step and acknowledge the newly-branded “Orangefest” as an integral part of their own Irish culture. Time is not on their side. They need to make this acknowledgment before the hardliners in Protestant Orangeism movement can airbrush Catholicism’s contribution to the Glorious Revolution out of history altogether.
