Matt Treacy ✒ The death of John Steele in Larne while building a bonfire for the Orange 11th night celebrations in Larne was predictably followed by the social media celebration common when one of their ones dies, preferably in tragic circumstances.


Steele was engaged in constructing a more than 50-foot-high bonfire that was to have been burned last night but it was taken down as a mark of respect to the dead man.

Watch On Twitter.

People may mock, and they do, the claims that all of this is part of a great cultural tradition. That’s as may be, and the Twelfth and all that goes with it; the bonfires, the big parade today in Belfast, the beating of the Lambeg drums and the celebration of a British loyalist identity that few English, Welsh or Scottish people – other than in places similar to Belfast and Larne around Glasgow – bother with anymore, may seem anachronistic but if people believe them to be important then they are. Lots of people have died and killed for that culture over the centuries here.

The Twelfth, as in the making of July 12 as a holiday, dates back to 1796. It remembers the date of the Battle of Aughrim in 1691, effectively the last stand of the remnants of the old Gaelic order fighting on the side of the Catholic King of England James II who had been overthrown in 1688. Unfortunately, it was not the last time that the Irish nation found itself disastrously dependent on unreliable foreign “allies” and ideologies.

While the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 in England is regarded as the beginning of constitutionalism, in Ireland the conflict between the Williamite Protestants and the Jacobite Catholics had to do with far more basic things – namely, the taking of almost all of the land of Ireland by English and Scottish settlers and the total suppression of everything that defined the losing side chiefly our language and religion.

That is what the bonfires and the drums are about. Reminding the Fenians who won in 1641 and 1691 and 1798 – and 1998 if it comes to that. That the Twelfth as the central celebration of the victory of the settlers should have become that definitive cultural expression in 1796 is no coincidence. It followed on the founding of the Orange Order in September 1795 after a battle between the Protestant Peep O’Day Boys and the Catholic Defenders near Loughgall – where another decisive defeat of nationalist insurgency took place almost 200 years later.

The 1790s were the time of the United Irishmen and the simplistic myth in republican historiography is that the budding union between Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter had been cunningly diverted into sectarian squabbling by the Ascendency class.

That myth has been regurgitated ever since in various guises; from the naïve belief that within the heart of every UVF man in a Rangers top there beats the ghost of a pike wielding Unitedman; through the Griffithian claim that the Orangeman would miraculously rediscover that separatism was a good business plan, to the leftist fantasy that Proletarian Internationalism would one day bring the workers together to smite imperialism and monopoly capitalism and build a Bucharest on the Boyne. The main nationalist party now seems to believe that more mass immigration under the guise of Pollyanna multi culturalism and diversity will help to heal the uncauterised running sores of the last great experiment in population plantation.

While there is no doubt that the English and the Protestant establishment in Ireland encouraged Orange violence and used it as part of the Terror that was unleashed after 1795 in order to pre-empt a feared insurrection backed by a French invasion, there was little encouragement needed.

The descendants of the settlers and the natives, especially in Ulster, had been at open and covert war for over 150 years. Even in Belfast and Dublin where there was support for American and French republicanism among the Protestant business and professional classes, there was huge suspicion regarding the mass of the population of Catholics.

While this was lent the cover of Enlightenment democratic concerns over Papist absolutism, Tone and Russell identified the issue of land – and the settler nightmare that the Cromwellian and Williamite expropriations might be overturned – as central to that suspicion. It was that which won out in 1798.

Tone had sought to persuade the Jacobin Protestants that the old Gaelic elite had been mostly destroyed and dispersed, and that Papist ignorance could be destroyed through enlightened education just as it had been among the formerly priest-ridden peasantry of France. When push came to shove, they mostly chose to ignore Tone and to place their trust in the older methods.

On the other side, it is apparent that the Defenders, enticed into an ultimately disastrous alliance with the United Irishmen whose leadership was both largely incompetent and prone to striking “honourable” gentlemen’s deals to save their own skins while the peasants were tortured, raped and murdered, represented what one historian described as the expectation of “millenarian proportions” that the land would indeed revert to the descendants of its rightful owners.

That is partly then what the Twelfth is about. It is the celebration of the historical victory of the descendants of the settlers, even the least successful of them, over the dispossessed natives. It is also of course a reminder that nothing will alter the formal constitutional position without the consent of the Ulster Protestants. This was accepted by all the representatives of Irish nationalism including the IRA in 1998.

Perhaps the start to any solution might be to move beyond the zero-sum game whose rules were set centuries ago. In the midst of prevailing international trends, the conflict here is increasingly irrelevant. Most Irish “nationalists” no longer believe in national sovereignty, and if anything their attempts to win over Ulster Protestants with the promise of submergence in a centralised EU which has nothing at its core other than corporate led economics and all that goes with that, is even less attractive than a British polity that at least partly bucked against the trend.

The more astute Irish nationalists have long since accepted that an independent sovereign Ireland would need to accept the historic ethnic and cultural differences within the island. Ulster Protestants are not going to one day undergo a miraculous epiphany and decide that they have only imagined that they were British by virtue of their historical heritage.

What they might do is realise that the future of anything resembling their Ireland and the historic Irish nation which goes back a lot further than its imagined beginnings in the late 18th century – which is the myth of civic nationalism – will only survive within a united Ireland based on an historical compromise in which the two nations, for want of a better word, come to a mutual agreement independent of, and separate from, any external political authority.

Happy Twelfth.

Matt Treacy has published a number of books including histories of 
the Republican Movement and of the Communist Party of Ireland. 

The Twelfth Is A Celebration Of Dispossession And Subjugation ✑ But Its Time To Move Beyond The Zero-Sum Game

Matt Treacy ✒ The death of John Steele in Larne while building a bonfire for the Orange 11th night celebrations in Larne was predictably followed by the social media celebration common when one of their ones dies, preferably in tragic circumstances.


Steele was engaged in constructing a more than 50-foot-high bonfire that was to have been burned last night but it was taken down as a mark of respect to the dead man.

Watch On Twitter.

People may mock, and they do, the claims that all of this is part of a great cultural tradition. That’s as may be, and the Twelfth and all that goes with it; the bonfires, the big parade today in Belfast, the beating of the Lambeg drums and the celebration of a British loyalist identity that few English, Welsh or Scottish people – other than in places similar to Belfast and Larne around Glasgow – bother with anymore, may seem anachronistic but if people believe them to be important then they are. Lots of people have died and killed for that culture over the centuries here.

The Twelfth, as in the making of July 12 as a holiday, dates back to 1796. It remembers the date of the Battle of Aughrim in 1691, effectively the last stand of the remnants of the old Gaelic order fighting on the side of the Catholic King of England James II who had been overthrown in 1688. Unfortunately, it was not the last time that the Irish nation found itself disastrously dependent on unreliable foreign “allies” and ideologies.

While the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 in England is regarded as the beginning of constitutionalism, in Ireland the conflict between the Williamite Protestants and the Jacobite Catholics had to do with far more basic things – namely, the taking of almost all of the land of Ireland by English and Scottish settlers and the total suppression of everything that defined the losing side chiefly our language and religion.

That is what the bonfires and the drums are about. Reminding the Fenians who won in 1641 and 1691 and 1798 – and 1998 if it comes to that. That the Twelfth as the central celebration of the victory of the settlers should have become that definitive cultural expression in 1796 is no coincidence. It followed on the founding of the Orange Order in September 1795 after a battle between the Protestant Peep O’Day Boys and the Catholic Defenders near Loughgall – where another decisive defeat of nationalist insurgency took place almost 200 years later.

The 1790s were the time of the United Irishmen and the simplistic myth in republican historiography is that the budding union between Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter had been cunningly diverted into sectarian squabbling by the Ascendency class.

That myth has been regurgitated ever since in various guises; from the naïve belief that within the heart of every UVF man in a Rangers top there beats the ghost of a pike wielding Unitedman; through the Griffithian claim that the Orangeman would miraculously rediscover that separatism was a good business plan, to the leftist fantasy that Proletarian Internationalism would one day bring the workers together to smite imperialism and monopoly capitalism and build a Bucharest on the Boyne. The main nationalist party now seems to believe that more mass immigration under the guise of Pollyanna multi culturalism and diversity will help to heal the uncauterised running sores of the last great experiment in population plantation.

While there is no doubt that the English and the Protestant establishment in Ireland encouraged Orange violence and used it as part of the Terror that was unleashed after 1795 in order to pre-empt a feared insurrection backed by a French invasion, there was little encouragement needed.

The descendants of the settlers and the natives, especially in Ulster, had been at open and covert war for over 150 years. Even in Belfast and Dublin where there was support for American and French republicanism among the Protestant business and professional classes, there was huge suspicion regarding the mass of the population of Catholics.

While this was lent the cover of Enlightenment democratic concerns over Papist absolutism, Tone and Russell identified the issue of land – and the settler nightmare that the Cromwellian and Williamite expropriations might be overturned – as central to that suspicion. It was that which won out in 1798.

Tone had sought to persuade the Jacobin Protestants that the old Gaelic elite had been mostly destroyed and dispersed, and that Papist ignorance could be destroyed through enlightened education just as it had been among the formerly priest-ridden peasantry of France. When push came to shove, they mostly chose to ignore Tone and to place their trust in the older methods.

On the other side, it is apparent that the Defenders, enticed into an ultimately disastrous alliance with the United Irishmen whose leadership was both largely incompetent and prone to striking “honourable” gentlemen’s deals to save their own skins while the peasants were tortured, raped and murdered, represented what one historian described as the expectation of “millenarian proportions” that the land would indeed revert to the descendants of its rightful owners.

That is partly then what the Twelfth is about. It is the celebration of the historical victory of the descendants of the settlers, even the least successful of them, over the dispossessed natives. It is also of course a reminder that nothing will alter the formal constitutional position without the consent of the Ulster Protestants. This was accepted by all the representatives of Irish nationalism including the IRA in 1998.

Perhaps the start to any solution might be to move beyond the zero-sum game whose rules were set centuries ago. In the midst of prevailing international trends, the conflict here is increasingly irrelevant. Most Irish “nationalists” no longer believe in national sovereignty, and if anything their attempts to win over Ulster Protestants with the promise of submergence in a centralised EU which has nothing at its core other than corporate led economics and all that goes with that, is even less attractive than a British polity that at least partly bucked against the trend.

The more astute Irish nationalists have long since accepted that an independent sovereign Ireland would need to accept the historic ethnic and cultural differences within the island. Ulster Protestants are not going to one day undergo a miraculous epiphany and decide that they have only imagined that they were British by virtue of their historical heritage.

What they might do is realise that the future of anything resembling their Ireland and the historic Irish nation which goes back a lot further than its imagined beginnings in the late 18th century – which is the myth of civic nationalism – will only survive within a united Ireland based on an historical compromise in which the two nations, for want of a better word, come to a mutual agreement independent of, and separate from, any external political authority.

Happy Twelfth.

Matt Treacy has published a number of books including histories of 
the Republican Movement and of the Communist Party of Ireland. 

8 comments:

  1. "The main nationalist party now seems to believe that more mass immigration under the guise of Pollyanna multi culturalism and diversity will help to heal the uncauterised running sores of the last great experiment in population plantation."

    Is this Matt's version of the Great Replacement Theory? Is it worth pointing out that the Plantations of the 17th century were genuine and forcible dispossession of the indigenous population; immigration to 21st century Ireland is an entirely voluntary process.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Matt appears to revise history fit his own interpretation and narrative. For the record, though I'm sure our reformist historian knows , the United Irish leadership and many rank and file were Protestant or Presbytarian. Wolf Tonne, Protestant, Henry Munroe, Presbytarian, Henry Joy McCracken and Mary Anne McCracken, Protestant, Jemmy Hope Protestant, the list is long. Catholic interest on the venture was luke warm. The Penal Codes had been relaxed and many Catholics, though not entirely satisfied, settled for that.

    The OO as per do not like to admit that many of their co-religionists forefathers took up arms against the crown.

    Caoimhin O'Muraile

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Matt Treacy Comments

      I do not mean to be disrespectful old chap, but you ought to read some history other than Connolly and his piss poor imitators.

      When push came to shove in 1798 the settlers including the lowest of them were out burning and torturing and murdering and looting the natives. The only prods out were the leaders who had the decency to back it all up rather than turn tout as most of them did. The people who fought were the taigs.

      Actually, you need go no further back than 1969 when communists like yourself led us into another disaster.

      We either kill them all - option in 1641 but not after that - or come to some arrangement that doesn't involve the Brits.

      Delete
  3. As much as some Republican might wish 'The Twelfth' is not going to disappear and will be an integral part of any new Ireland. Like it or not but a sizable part of the population take part in each and every year, and this consists of every shade on Unionism and that's where the problem lays. Year after year it appears that no one can contain must lumpen elements of Loyalism, witnessed this year in the effigies and election posters which were placed on some bonfires this year. It appears that the usual targets of SF are no longer enough with Alliance, the PSNI, the GFA and most bizarre of all, People Before Profit posters all added to the hate list.

    How all this can be addressed is down to Unionist leaders. It will be interesting to see if recent words are put into action.

    ReplyDelete
  4. That is true, the twelth celebrations are going nowhere soon. Frankly and as a socialist republican why should it go away, it is part of Irish cultural history in what is hoped will be a multi citural Ireland.
    My problem with the twelth is not that it commemorates part of Irish history but the sectarian nature, based not on history but hatred, of the events in their present form. There is no need for the bitter anti catholic nature of the twelth, as it is now, which has nothing to do with culture apart from the culture of hate, if culture is the right word. Neither should working-classs people be celebrating the misleadingly termed "Glorious Revolution" which the Williamite wars signalled the conclusion of. But the dates, 1689-91, are an integral part of Irish history which should be commemorated by all, including all feligious denominations and those of us who have no religious beliefs. It should be a carnival, the Nottinghill Carnival in London would not be a bad blue print to follow. End the sectprian hatred and let all enjoy.

    Caoimhin O'Muraile

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ". It should be a carnival, the Nottinghill Carnival in London would not be a bad blue print to follow."
      I have noticed there seems to be a gradual change towards this way too among the bands. Then you have dipsticks throwing bins at them to provoke a response.

      Delete
  5. Interesting article which doesn't take into account the rise of the Alliance party in the North. This is a curve ball which Nordy Shinners and PUL need to get to grips with. The young have zero interest in the politics of the past.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It is to be hoped that the more memories of the bad old days recede a critical mass of the NI electorate tick the box for parties styled "Other" (the SDLP could do worse than redesignate as "Other" - it would do some justice to its name then); the DUP and Sinn Fein would lose their stranglehold over power and resources in NI. But I guess I am being a tad optimistic!

      Delete