Sir - If the Orange Order's insistence on marching down the Garvaghy Road is really just an assertion of traditional civil and religious liberties, then it is fair to ask when and under what circumstances such a "tradition" arose. The reasons why Orange marches "traditionally" parade through nationalist areas - as opposed to all the other areas they could parade through unmolested - is to remind a defeated party that it is defeated, to assert Protestant superiority and reinforce outdated stereotypes, to triumph and to rub people's noses in it. In the face of the 72 per cent electoral support for the Belfast Agreement and the accommodation and change it heralds, such a "tradition" is not worth maintaining. The Orange Order, of course, has publicly rejected the Agreement, highlighting yet again the sort of Northern Ireland it stands for. Striking also is the relative silence of the Order's upper echelons in condemning the shameful acts of violence carried out on Catholic churches, schools and residences, or the illegal road blocks and sieges of nationalist villages like Dunloy by loyalist mobs. Since such attacks are entirely "traditional" for the marching season, are these the "civil liberties" the Order is standing up for? That such acts are the work of thugs is not to be doubted, but they are thugs acting within a mandate of intimidation and unruliness that has long stemmed from the broader Orange movement.
As if these points were not enough, the refusal of the Order even to meet with the Garvaghy Road residents or with the Parades Commission reveals Orangeism for what it is, despite Ruth Dudley Edwards's pathetic pleas to the contrary: it stands for a bigoted, triumphalist, intransigent and unruly past that most people in the North of Ireland have made clear they want to get away from.
No one is fooled by the Order's vapid appeals to tradition or to liberty. They ring about as true as the white supremacist Aryan Nation's claims in this country that it is merely "celebrating whiteness." Indeed. At the cost of blackness, brownness, redness and yellowness. Likewise, Orangeism is not merely a celebration of Protestantism and unionism but a devaluation of Catholicism and nationalism. While Ruth Dudley Edwards might believe that specific Orangemen are terribly decent chaps when you meet them one-on-one, she should be reminded that a corporate identity can be very different from that of the individuals who comprise it; many supporters of apartheid or the Ku Klux Klan were probably great at barbecues, but that does not make their ideals any more palatable. - Yours, etc., Garrett G. Fagan,
Pennsylvania, USA