Newton Emerson: Socially distanced Twelfth saw Orange Order finally ditch the rabble

It has been the least bad Twelfth of July in living memory, thanks to celebrations being largely cancelled – something that has never happened voluntarily before in the tradition’s 224 history, apart from during both world wars.

The Orange Order was banned in the mid-19th century, but of course this did not last or prevent trouble.

Stopping main parades this year due to coronavirus has delivered a lesson no less pointed for being obvious. The best thing the Orange Order can do for everything it holds dear is to stay at home and think about reinventing itself.

There are signs this has been widely taken on board, helped by a confluence of unionist and republican cynicism. Sinn Féin was so clearly desperate for lockdown rules to be trashed to distract from its IRA funeral scandal that unionists resolved not to oblige.

Newton Emerson: Funeral raises questions over how much SF president McDonald is in charge

---

Newton Emerson: A unionist-free Seanad? Nobody minds really

---

Newton Emerson: Why we need to talk about Dublin and Belfast

---

Newton Emerson: Northern Irish Greens’ fingerprints all over programme for government

---

Despite appeals from Orange and unionist leaders, some bonfires and larger band parades did go ahead.

The result was an experiment that isolated out each half of the July festivities.

The marching season has a formal aspect, comprising parades and assemblies by the Orange Order and similar organisations, and an informal aspect, comprising bonfires, loyalist flute bands and marking out territory with flags.

For more than two centuries, Orange parades were the focus of trouble and complaint. While it would be brave to suggest this is a thing of the past, the last flashpoint Orange march was resolved by local agreement in 2016, delivering the longest period without parade-related street disorder in Northern Ireland since the 1950s.

A legal system of parade regulation, painfully put together over the past 20 years, has been begrudgingly accepted.

Vanity of the bonfires

As this part of the Twelfth has ceased to be contentious, attention has turned to the remainder, bonfires in particular.

For many loyalists, this is a sign their opponents will never be satisfied.

For many in the Orange Order, it is a genuine headache.

The order does not organise bonfires, put up flags or run flute bands, but it has struggled to disassociate itself from practices so bound up with its own.

Loyalist paramilitaries are closely linked to flute bands, which participate in Orange parades. Paramilitary organisations have increasingly muscled in on bonfires, to extract cash and kudos from regulatory schemes. There is a crossover of Orange and paramilitary membership, especially in parts of Belfast. The order has issued a number of condemnations and apologies for bonfires and flute bands in recent years, to general confusion, as condemnation implies it is not responsible while apology implies the reverse.

This year, suddenly, there is a clean separation. The Orange Order announced the Twelfth was cancelled at the start of lockdown in April and repeated this message consistently. Individual bands could parade in their own areas but only if social distancing was observed and all spectators stayed in their homes or gardens.

People were told to find innovative ways to celebrate, with drive-in sermons, backyard mini-bonfires and virtual parades around living rooms. The comic potential of this was embraced with good spirit.

What was left outside, frankly, was a rabble. Among the disgraceful incidents making headlines were grotesque sectarian graffiti and the burning of Irish flags and nationalist election posters, plus the usual vulgar displays of drunkenness, gormlessness and littering.

Something about the Protestant character has been perfectly captured by how this division of the Twelfth into its respectable and unrespectable halves has finally enabled unionist and Orange leaders to hit out.

DUP first minister Arlene Foster told those "putting sectarian and offensive messages" on bonfires" to "ask themselves what sort of a Northern Ireland do they want to live in".

“I know certainly the one in which I want to live.”

Badly wrong

Wallace Thompson, a prominent Orangeman and founding member of the DUP, said “there is something badly wrong at the heart of what is pathetically described as loyalist ‘culture’ ”.

Extolling evangelical Protestants to "reach out to our Roman Catholic neighbours", he said most bonfires "contain sinister displays of naked sectarian hatred" that must be "unreservedly condemned".

What long-term impact will any of this have as the marching season returns to “normal”?

A decade ago, the Orange Order had an internal debate about whether its future lay as a religious or a cultural organisation.

It decided the latter was the best hope for attracting new members and moving to a conventional “festival” model of the Twelfth, which it considered essential to the institution’s survival. But in its heart it remains a religious organisation, so the argument was never quite settled.

The order should now realise it can be both cultural and religious, as long as it has the courage of its convictions.

It has shown enough principle and practical imagination to reform the parts of its tradition worth saving and lead others in ending the rest.

Parading seemed like an eternal problem only a couple of years before it was resolved.

For all the apparent intractability of Orangeism and loyalism, major change is possible.