Two `victories' celebrated in festival style

HAD Fellini, the Italian film director been born in Northern Ireland his movies would have been even more surrealistic.

It was a strange thought to have in Tandragee where the "victorious" Portadown Orangemen and the rest of the Co Armagh brethren were parading yesterday.

But there was a certain logic to the unbidden impression. Fellini captured the paradoxical harmonisation of the rational and the absurd in his depiction of Italian life. What exotic work would he have created were he born in Portadown?

Orangemen were in no doubt that they had good reason for the Drumcree stand-off. It was the absurd and tragic expression of their argument that left one reeling.

Northern Ireland has been in ferment this past week. Riots blockades, sectarian intimidation, Protestant Orangemen in full regalia telling Protestant policemen at Drumcree "we know where you live", an innocent Catholic murdered by a loyalist who would cite Drumcree as justification for his act, violent nationalist reaction, and even, for goodness sake, a mini-riot in a hospital casualty department in Derry.

And here in Tandragee yet another of the North's 3,000 annual parades, more than 90 per cent of them reflecting Orange and unionist tradition. So many parades. Where do people get the time to do anything else?

In truth, Tandragee, where 25,000 Orangemen, bands members and supporters had assembled, was a grand and colourful occasion, a family day out, a pleasant town to celebrate Orange culture and the glorious Twelfth. But there was another theme as well.

There were wonderful, ornate Orange banners, depicting the Battle of the Boyne, King Billy on his white charger, the lifting of the siege in Derry in 1689.

There were illustrations of Dan Winter's cottage where the Orange Order was effectively founded just over 200 years.

In the field where the Orangemen completed their parade, a little girl strolled around dressed up like King Billy. Sandwiches were on sale in the tent of the Mountain Lodge Church. Woolly dolls adorned in Orange collarettes and bowler hats were on sale in the hucksters stalls. Some of the same stalls blared out maudlin tunes about UDA and UVF men who had "given their lives for Ulster".

Elderly Orangemen, their furled brollies gently swinging, spoke of Drumcree, the weather, the crops.

The Portadown brethren, of all the lodges at Tandragee, naturally enough won the biggest cheer of the day. Harold Gracey, who led the Portadown Orangemen at Drumcree proudly took the plaudits paid to him. But after marching to the field, he headed back into Tandragee to take a nap, exhausted after the five days at Drumcree.

Tandragee was a grandiose, theatrical, jolly occasion, as are most Twelfth parades. But there is no escaping what it also expressed.

The actual Battle of the Boyne must have resembled aspects of the Twelfth parade in Tandragee. Here they were, all gathered in the big field, like an Orange army would have gathered 306 years ago.

Many of the bands were dressed in military uniform. The Orangemen paraded in martial line, clutching their ceremonial swords and pikes. The Lambeg drums were banged loudly and incessantly. The message was unmistakably "No Surrender".

Certainly it was a day of cultural expression, but it was also an expression of Orange, unionist, Protestant strength and ascendancy, a remembrance of a victory in 1690, and of a victory on Thursday.