It’s not all King Billy and marching to the drums on July 12
Learning from rock star Jon Bon Jovi’s mistake, Liam Collins went to visit the Orange Order
BEFORE we sneer at ageing rock guitarist Jon Bon Jovi’s mangled version of Bono’s history and geography, maybe we should consider just how ignorant most of us are about the Orange Order.
Contrasting his upbringing in sedate New Jersey with Bono’s during The Troubles in Ireland, the heavy metal guitarist sympathised: “I never had the Orangemen walking through my neighbourhood saying, you know, get the Catholic kid and beat him up.”
However ill-informed it was, the comment has done more to raise the profile of the Order internationally than any single event since the Siege of the Garvaghy Road.
“It certainly provoked amusement around here” said good-natured Rev Mervyn Gibson, Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Ireland, when I met him at the Orange Museum in the Castlereagh district of Belfast.
“We are used to ill-informed comments because some people want to demonise us – but really we don’t need celebrities making up stories that clearly are not true.”
How Bon Jovi (right) got this garbled version of Bono’s upbringing in Ballymun is unclear. But many
Irish people also have scant understanding of the Orange Order and its rituals and history.
Our views are formed by television pictures of its more demented elements insisting on their right to “walk the Queen’s highway” through Catholic/ nationalist areas around July 12, to rub their noses in the defeat of Catholic King James II by the Protestant William III at the Battle of the Boyne at Oldbridge, Co Louth in 1690.
“Who would you think this is?” asks the curator of the museum, Jonathan Mattison, when we encounter a redcoated soldier on a life-size rampant white stallion.
“King Billy,” I answer too quickly, knowing it is a trick question.
“That’s what most people say, but its actually a horseman from Sir Neil O’Neill’s Dragoons who held Ros na Ri for King James against General Schomberg during the battle,” he replies, indicating the green bough in the soldier’s hat.
The museum is situated in Schomberg House, dedicated to the Orange general killed in the conflict, but also in this way commemorates O’Neill who died later in Waterford of his injuries. Rev Gibson adds: “We got that horse from a museum in America that was closing down, Clint Eastwood once sat on it.”
History is never quite as literal as later propagandists would like people to think. The Battle of the Boyne was part of an international conflict known to Orangemen as part of ‘The Glorious Revolution’. The French and Irish fought on both sides, King Billy’s Dutch Blue Guard was mostly Catholic and the Pope supported Protestant King William. Many of those involved were mercenary soldiers,
fighting for money as well as their lives.
The walls of the Orange Museum are adorned by some surprising ‘Brothers’, at least for someone coming from the south. The Home Rule MP Isaac Butt, who invented the parliamentary filibuster, was a member, as was Free State government minister Ernest Blythe, who was also a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). Dr Richard Kane was an enthusiastic Irish speaker who had ‘Erin go Bragh’ inscribed over one of the Order’s lodges.
As well as prime ministers of Northern Ireland, Canada and New Zealand, members included George Best
( junior section), founder of Liverpool Football Club John Houlding, Dr Thomas Barnardo, founder of the care homes that bear his name – and William Greer, John F Kennedy’s driver when he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas in 1963.
The Orange Order, founded in 1871 out of what were previously known as Boyne Societies, adopted some of the arcane rituals of freemasonry. But it is best known for July 12 celebrations and its sash and bowler hatted members. But it is now keen to emphasise its place in the unionist diaspora, with lodges in Scotland, the Americas, Cuba and even parts of the far-flung former British colonies in Africa.
Among the museum’s exhibits is a very wellpreserved Boyne musket which – in a rush of blood to the head – the Rev Ian Paisley presented to Bertie Ahern at the opening of the Battle of the Boyne visitor centre in Co Louth. He had to ask for it back later as it didn’t belong to the Order at the time!
The battle site at Oldbridge, Co Louth once contained the Boyne Obelisk, which was higher than Nelson’s Pillar, Dublin (40.8m) and his monument in Trafalgar
Square, London. It was blown up by, it is said, by drunken Free State soldiers in 1923. The Orange Order is now in discussions about re-modelling the stump into a new monument.
Orange parades have always been marked by the rhythmic beat of the Lambeg drum,
which, like the war pipes, was designed to strike fear into the heart of the enemy.
Curator Jonathan Mattison says: “In the days before the Troubles the Lambeg would be played on the Twelfth of July, but in many rural parts of Ulster the Ancient Order of Hibernians would borrow them for their Our Lady’s Day celebrations.”
Such traditions were blown away by the Troubles that afflicted so many during 30 years of violence.
Chris Hudson, pastor of AllSaints in Belfast but originally from Dún Laoghaire, tells me that one of his flock is a member of the Invictus Choir. They recorded with Bon Jovi in the Abbey Road Studios in London and he later sent fraternal greetings to the church in Belfast.
So maybe that spirit of co-existence will return and one day Bon Jovi will take up the Orange Order’s invitation to visits its museum.
After all it’s not far up the road from Slane, where both he and King Billy once performed, even if it was on a different theatre and a few hundred years apart.