The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions

"What Ruth Dudley Edwards is doing, in this book, is getting inside the Orange Order. She’s not a person of belief herself, but she’s a Catholic by background. She writes about it broadly sympathetically, because it’s an embedded report, she’s writing from within the Orange Order, and naturally, her views are quite sympathetic. It goes up to the Drumcree controversies of the mid-1990s and the issues over policing and Army protection of marches. It’s very contemporary in the way that it understands the Orange Order and the marching season. “If you’re from a unionist community, as far as I’m aware, you’re just as likely to vote for the DUP if you’re 20 as if you’re 70” It’s also important in the way it describes the Order as an international order. She points out that there are African, Canadian and New Zealand branches and so on—as well as its very strong support in Scotland and Northern Ireland. And of course there are still a few Orangemen in the Irish Republic, mostly in the border counties. The Orange Order is generally thought to have grown out of the conflicts in Ireland, north and south, in the 1790s, which were associated with the developments that led to the rising of 1798. It was a defensive order, primarily to defend the interests of northern Protestants, but also to express their loyalty to King William of Orange and celebrate the victories that have defined their identity—particularly the successful resistance to King James’s forces at Derry in 1689—the apprentice boys shutting the gate—and the victory at the Boyne in 1690. It’s rather like the Freemasons—and there was quite a lot of overlap between the two. It’s set up in lodges, and there are worshipful masters, grand masters and so on. The Orange Order is not a secret society, but it’s a social club that reinforces Presbyterian Protestant and unionist values. And that’s really how it’s remained up to the present day. “One of the reasons why the marches are so controversial is not just that they go through nationalist areas—because they do—but also because they are about possessing history” It’s not a paramilitary organization, which is not to say that none of its members have ever had any links with paramilitaries. It’s not, in itself, an organization that seeks to operate outside the law, at all. It is largely peaceful, but intensely tribal. They’re marching to reinscribe important sites in the history of Northern Ireland— their history of Northern Ireland. One of the reasons why the marches are so controversial is not just that they go through nationalist areas—because they do—but also because they are about possessing history. They are about possessing the history of a place, by commemorating the victory of one side over the other. Although Orange marches annoy people, and sometimes people object to them in other towns and cities, in Northern Ireland, they have a special quality. They are reenacting a history of overlordship. That no longer exists, but that’s what they commemorate. It doesn’t look like it. I haven’t got the figures for the annual Boyne reenactment, but the Orange Order—both in Northern Ireland and slightly more surprisingly, in Scotland—though declining, isn’t declining as fast as you’d expect. The signs, such as they are, are that there isn’t a big generational shift in Northern Ireland that would lead to different forms of voting behaviour. If you look at the Scottish independence referendum, you’re much more likely to vote for the Union if you’re old than if you’re young; if you look at Brexit, you’re much more likely to vote to leave if you’re old than if you’re young. But if you’re from a unionist community, as far as I’m aware, you’re just as likely to vote for the DUP if you’re 20 as if you’re 70. Very interesting. She’s a very interesting writer and she’s been very courageous in getting into the heart of Orangeism. I suppose the only thing is that it is very much one side of the story. It’s like histories of the IRA that are written by people who interview a load of IRA men and nobody else—there is a risk you get a bit too sympathetic. Similarly, she gets into the heart of the Orange Order—she’s met a lot of them and naturally she likes them and gets on with some of them. She does enjoy their trust, and that means she’s got to be sympathetic to them. So you do have to put it in perspective and say there was a group of other people out there with very different views. But it’s a very important book."