The Irish in the Atlantic World

The Orange Atlantic

The Orange Atlantic Donald M. MacRaild After three decades of conflict, the recent political settlement in Northern Ireland has inevitably led to new light being cast onto the Orange Order, an organization closely associated with the Protestant-Unionist hegemony in the province. The political situation has transformed so radically that the power base of the Protestant majority has been permanently eroded, presenting many challenges to both the political establishment and the grass roots. Inevitably these changing realities have also resulted in academic reconsiderations. The notion that Northern Ireland was an adamantine “Orange State”1 gained currency from the political performance of the Unionist parties between 1945 and the recent cessation of hostilities in the 1990s, but a new and more complex reality is emerging that reveals enduring divisions within Unionism and a historic factionalism within Orangeism. The most recent and important scholarly works on the subjects of Unionism and Orangeism point to a much more brittle political culture and rather weaker social glue than was once envisioned.2 Recent studies of Orangeism suggest a movement more open to investigation by academics and, simultaneously, a culture in crisis.3 Declining membership, caused mainly by a sense of alienation among younger members of the Protestant community, has been a major issue. Drumcree in the 1990s sharpened the association of Orangeism with violence, and the laments of moderates within the organization intensified. Orangemen, it seems, regard themselves as victims of irrevocably changing times.4 So great is this change that some outside the organization , as well as some inside it, have proposed turning the “Glorious Twelfth” (July 12, commemorating the Battle of the Boyne in 1690) into something approaching the Mardi Gras in Rio de Janeiro or the Notting Hill Carnival in London . Funding has even been provided to probe this possibility.5 Some former Orangemen today blame their plight on a leadership that has allowed the balance of “rough” and “respectable” forces (which has been an ever present feature of the movement) to shift dramatically in favor of the former. This was certainly the point of Rev. Warren Porter’s scathing attack on the leadership 308 | Donald M. MacRaild of the Orange Order in his foreword to the Reverend Brian Kennaway’s study The Orange Order: A Tradition Betrayed. Porter suggests that a sensible, solid citizenry in the middle ground of the Orange Order authored its own “downfall” by allowing lodges to be overrun by “‘kick the Pope’ reactionaries, most of whom,” Porter argued, “could not give an intelligent or intelligible critique of Roman Catholicism if it were to save their lives.”6 This failure is why well-heeled middle-class people have less to do with the order now. The vacuum has resulted in a proletarianization of the movement and a corresponding radicalization of its politics. Porter and Kennaway do not like the fact, and they think it is unique. However, to the social historian, there is nothing new in the tension between sober leaders, who stressed fraternity and comradeship, and a brutish element, which enjoyed drinking, goading, and fighting.7 When viewed from the perspective of the Irish diaspora placed around the seaboard edges of the North Atlantic, the competition between the “rough” and the “respectable” takes on a wholly different complexion. The history of Orangeism in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World tells of historic and continuing tensions between groups within the organization , graded by degrees of respectability. The violence of the “spirit of Drumcree ,” which so appals Kennaway and Porter today, was a regular feature of the Orange tradition in the nineteenth century. Moreover, in the 1870s and 1880s, violence was not just an Ulster phenomenon but also occurred in Canada, Britain, and, to a lesser extent, Australasia. Indeed, it may be argued that, if we take a historical perspective, violence was an ever-present threat to the spirit of self-improving collectivism of the “respectable” membership. For newspapermen and magistrates in various parts of the Atlantic World, violence was main mark of the Orange Order.8 Consequently Orangemen have always busily claimed to run a society of sober and sociable sorts—being at the same time kindred spirits in anti-Catholicism and brothers in self-improvement.9 The issue of “rough” and “respectable” needs to be discussed in more detail because of what it reveals about innate tensions in Orangeism. As such this chapter plots a route through some of the convergent issues that make for comparisons between Orange traditions around the Atlantic World, but mainly...