In a Word... Orange

Happy Eve of the Twelfth. I've attended more Orange parades than some might consider acceptable for a native-born son of Roscommon. Included were eight at Drumcree. O Drumcree! Groundhog Day all over again, year after year.

Its Church of the Ascension on a hill in the pastoral Armagh countryside became a symbol of so much trouble and strife back then in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the Orangemen were denied their traditional route back to Portadown through the nationalist Garvaghy Road area.

I had decided to accompany the Orangemen each of those years mainly because I felt it would be a useful exercise as a journalist and also as it might be an education for myself, as someone from a place where there were few Protestants.

In Ballaghaderreen as I grew up there was just one Protestant family. It was a monochrome town of white, Catholic nationalists. The only son of that Protestant family sat beside me in the Brothers’ school and because of him I had my very first doubts about Catholicism.

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My aunts’ bookshop was heaven for me in childhood

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Come on, Mr Portillo, say ‘Dáil’ again. You know we like it

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I could not accept that someone so mannerly was destined for hell when the outrageous reprobates in our class were not, because they were Catholic.

Initially those Portadown Orangemen were very fair. They regarded me, as all other media covering their Drumcree parade, with equal disdain. Over the years that changed as we got to know one another, so much so that our annual meetings those mornings of the first Sundays in July at Carleton St Orange Hall almost became something of a reunion.

We had got to know each other, beneath the labels.

For the world, these mainly farming people always reminded me of those further south on the way to a GAA match, but with a crustier edge to their humour. And as with those GAA supporters in the past, the Orangemen could not see anything wrong with those rules, anthems, hymns, or flags that kept others out. They saw only what was positive and to be celebrated in their tradition.

The sad thing for Ireland is that those within the Orange tradition have not interrogated their culture with the same vigour as has happened in the GAA, moving to a world of many more colours than Orange.

Orange from Old French orange, Italian arancia, an alteration of Arabic naranj, from Persian narang.