If Patrick Costello had his way, we’d be on a grand day off to celebrate King Billy

Any topic not related to RTÉ eruptions is a balm, so when Monday’s Liveline went full throttle on a statement from Green TD Patrick Costello suggesting a new national holiday, it sounded cheerful at least. Sadly, Costello was otherwise engaged when Liveline invited him on the show, but if he had his way, we could be on a grand day off right now, celebrating King Billy in glorious communion with the friendly local Orangemen or wringing dollars go leor out of Orange pilgrims flooding from afar to Williamite-Jacobite flashpoints.

Deputy Costello has high hopes for the latter and low thoughts about successive Irish governments who “for too long ... sought to portray a single narrative of Irish history, one that was isolationist, militant, nationalist and catholic”. Apart from small gestures such as the censorship of republican paramilitaries, the 94.4 per cent majority in the Republic who voted in favour of the Belfast Agreement, which ceded our territorial claim to the north, or the then president Mary McAleese’s official Twelfth receptions at the Áras every year from 1998 to honour Orangemen living in the Republic, he probably meant to add.

As a Government TD who is also a member of the Good Friday Agreement Oireachtas Committee, Costello’s words carry weight.

Wittingly or not, he launched his campaign on the heavily publicised 25th anniversary of the Drumcree standoff. That evoked 1998 of course, when the RUC was 93 per cent Protestant and the Orange Order’s determination to walk the Garvaghy Road leg of the Portadown parade had turned a rural landscape into a war zone, summer after summer. In the early hours of July 12th that year, three little boys – Richard, Mark and Jason Quinn – were burned to death by the UVF in a savage sectarian attack on their Ballymoney home.

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The Irish Times’s former religious affairs correspondent Patsy McGarry, who spent eight summers witnessing rioting Orange supporters at Drumcree, has calculated that the Drumcree parade alone played a direct role in the deaths of 10 people, nine of them Catholic.

The Orange Order has never acknowledged responsibility for any of this. Nor for the hundreds injured, the thousands intimidated out of their homes, the millions of pounds of damage done to churches, Orange halls and other property.

It was obvious to many journalists how the Order could keep its rioters on or off the leash when it suited. I watched a purple-faced bandsman hammering his Lambeg drum so violently at a nationalist flashpoint that he smashed through the drumskin. At another year’s “celebration” on the Ormeau Bridge, a marcher had barely time to bellow “We want our route” before two burly brethren had lifted him by the shoulders and bundled him away, pulling off his Orange collarette and telling him “ye’ll never walk again”.

Both sides could do that when it suited. Yet it’s only eight years since 24 police officers were hurt and a 16-year-old girl was trapped under a car driven by a man in Orange regalia that mounted a pavement in Ardoyne. The violence broke out after returning Orange marchers were prevented from going past a nationalist area. But the truth is that Orange parades have been destabilising society for much longer than that.

In 1920, a few days after an incendiary speech on the Twelfth by Sir Edward Carson criticising the British government’s failure to protect them against the nationalist hordes, all 5,000 Catholic workers were violently driven out of the Belfast shipyards.

The first core value of the Orange institution has always been “the preservation and propagation of the Protestant religion”, said former senior Orangeman Rev Brian Kennaway in 2006. And no, “a new word suggesting an emerging culture: Orangefest”, wouldn’t do either, declared Kennaway on foot of the then grand secretary’s plans to rebrand and “celebrate the way Brazilians celebrate Mardi Gras”.

Was former Orange Order leader Drew Nelson aware “that Mardi Gras is a Roman Catholic celebration held just before the beginning of Lent? There is a foundation within Protestant culture beyond which we cannot go; otherwise we lose our raison d’être, ie the authority of scripture”, Kennaway said in a talk he gave at the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in Wicklow.

The Orange Order has always declared itself a religious and cultural organisation, certainly not political. But if it was and is intrinsically anti-Catholic, how do the second two chime with the first in the case of a jolly national holiday here in the Republic, however conciliatory we may want to be?

Might that flood of Orange dollars make us more amenable though? “But the Orange Order is already brilliant for tourism”, said Belfast lecturer Jude Whyte, “because all the Catholics get out and go down south [to escape the Twelfth]. This place will die today [Monday] and you won’t see anyone till Sunday”. That, like the Orange parades and routes, is an old tradition too, if not an entirely voluntary one.

Costello’s big idea comes at a fragile time for the Order. Plans to shorten the Belfast parade from 10 miles to four – purportedly to address the “abysmal and unacceptable” behaviour at last year’s outing – are more likely related to the fact that the membership is not just ageing but dwindling.

[ A concise history of the Orange Order ]

Back in 2009, it stood at 35,000, compared with 76,000 in 1948. Yet “100,000 [members] worldwide” was the mantra, said Kennaway scornfully then, which led him to ask: “Are we seriously expected to believe there are 65,000 members from Canada to Togo?” What might the worldwide figure be now when the domestic estimate is down to 28,000? Back to the drawing board.