Indeed, I’ve carried this dark humour into my career in journalism as a mental health coping mechanism.
However, it was to be this dark sense which landed me in some hot water with my line management at the News Letter in the mid 1980s when I was dispatched to the picturesque County Down village of Scarva for the traditional 13th July Sham Fight hosted by the Loyal Order’s senior movement, the Royal Black Institution.
In fact, my late dad, Rev Dr Robert Coulter MBE, a Past Assistant Sovereign Grand Master and Deputy Imperial Grand Chaplain in the Black Institution, was one of the preachers that day during the platform proceedings.
The Sham Fight’s day of activities includes a reenactment of the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690 when the Protestant Orange champion, King William III, defeated his Catholic father-in-law, King James II, to militarily seal victory for the Glorious Revolution.
Having written my story of the day’s events, known then as a colour piece, I rang the copy taker at the News Letter to phone through my story. My headline read: ‘Shock win for James!’ The news desk certainly did not appreciate my humour!
But that memory from the mid 1980s aptly summarises the dilemma which the Loyal Orders, and especially the Orange with the Twelfth only a couple of days away, face in terms of their influence in the pro-Union community.
Orangeism is in danger of facing a ‘Shock win for James’ outcome if it fails to give the pro-Union community a constructive and workable way out of the current Stormont impasse.
For me, as someone who has lived most of my life in an Ulster Unionist Party, Loyal Orders, and mainstream Irish Presbyterian upbringing, the Orange Order was the cement which kept the pro-Union community together. The aristocratic businessman could sit with the working class labourer in the lodge room and call each other ‘brother’ as equals.
During the many decades of Northern Ireland’s existence, when the Unionist Party dominated the Stormont Parliament before 1972, the Orange lodge room was how the ruling upper and middle class dominated Unionist Party could communicate with the Loyalist working class.
But just as the Unionist parties in 2023 clearly seem disconnected from the Loyalist working class, so too, is the Orange Order in danger of becoming disconnected in terms of influence from the pro-Union community.
With the Covid pandemic restrictions well and truly lifted, we can expect tens of thousands to attend the various Twelfth demonstrations across Northern Ireland on Wednesday, followed by tens of thousands more folk to pack into Scarva on the 13th for the Sham Fight.
But what messages of hope and positive leadership for the pro-Union community in the midst of a cost of living crisis will be heard from the various demonstration field platforms? Given that financial crisis, coupled with the ongoing Stormont impasse, the pro-Union community really needs a religious and political constructive boost.
This uplift is especially required after May’s council elections when the Provisional IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, copied its Stormont achievement of last year and became the largest party in terms of seats across Northern Ireland’s 11 councils.
Many Unionists and Loyalists have the current fear that if the DUP cannot secure a deal over the Windsor Framework, Stormont will be permanently mothballed as in 1972 to be replaced with some form of Joint Authority for Northern Ireland in which Dublin has an even greater say in the running of this part of the UK than it enjoyed under the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement.
Basically, Orangeism needs to send out a three-fold message to the pro-Union community. Firstly, the Order can act as a catalyst to mobilise the pro-Union vote and combat the scourge of voter apathy in the pro-Union community. Put bluntly, how many Unionist Assembly and council seats were lost to Unionists not coming out to vote?
Secondly, many Orange platform proceedings will involve a religious service. The Order must face up to its spiritual obligation to encourage people to re-engage or develop their Christian faith. The Order must issue a challenge to the Christian Churches - especially the various Protestant denominations - to join this pro-Union voter mobilisation.
Thirdly, the Order can act as a forum to develop Unionist political unity. Again the question can be posed - how many Unionist seats were lost at the Assembly poll in 2022 and the council election in May because Unionist voters did not transfer to other pro-Union parties and candidates?
I have made no secret of my aspiration under my ideology of Revolutionary Unionism for a single unionist movement, simply called The Unionist Party, with a series of pressures groups to represent the various strands of pro-Union thinking in the same way as the Labour and Conservative parties in Great Britain contain a series of pressure groups to represent various views.
As a first step to achieving this single Unionist Party, the Orange Order must use its influence to re-launch the so-called United Ulster Unionist Council, or Unionist Coalition, (affectionately known as the Treble-UC) which existed in the 1970s to represent the various Unionist parties.
This need for the Orange Order to push this three-fold message is something which I have stressed in a previous column.
Likewise, having attended the annual Rossnowlagh demonstration in County Donegal, which normally takes place on the Saturday prior to the Twelfth and is hosted mainly by the Southern Ireland border county lodges - along with an increasingly large contingent from Northern Ireland, I am very much in favour of my Revolutionary Unionist movement having a more overt political influence in the 26 counties.
Again, this was a move I supported in an opinion piece in the Belfast News Letter where I was education and religious affairs correspondent in the 1980s.
Put bluntly again, Unionism needs to radically play the Orange Card as I outlined in this article.
Journalistic colleagues have written articles and produced documentaries on the threat posed by dissident republicans. I push the urgency of the Loyal Orders not to dilly-dally on the need to emphasise a purely democratic route for the pro-Union community.
At the back of my mind, I harbour a fear that if the various pro-Union parties and the Loyal Orders cannot get a workable solution to the Stormont impasse, that there are those who are the mirror image of dissident republicans lurking in the Loyalist community who will take the view - you Unionist politicians, Orange lodges and Protestant churches have had you chance; now it is our turn! The gun and bomb must never ever be allowed to return to pro-Union thinking and action. Democracy and the ballot box must always remain supreme.
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Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter Listen to commentator Dr John Coulter’s programme, Call In Coulter, every Saturday morning around 10.15 am on Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. Listen online. |
Genuine question to Dr Coulter and PUL commentators:
ReplyDelete"At the back of my mind, I harbour a fear that if the various pro-Union parties and the Loyal Orders cannot get a workable solution to the Stormont impasse, that there are those who are the mirror image of dissident republicans lurking in the Loyalist community who will take the view - you Unionist politicians, Orange lodges and Protestant churches have had you chance; now it is our turn"
Who would loyalists shoot and bomb to protest against a democratic event, sponsored by the British government, in which a majority of the population of Northern Ireland voted to leave the UK and join the Irish Republic?
What would the violent strategy be? What is the capability and capacity of loyalist organisations to enact said strategy? What price would be exacted upon with the wider PUL community by terrorism coming from its ranks?
I've said it before, and will say it again. Loyalism has lost every fight it's started since Obins Road in the 1980s. Drumcree, Harryville, Holy Cross, Flags, the "graduated response" and, it looks likely, the protocol.
Every time loyalist act out violently, nationalism emerges stronger.
Loyalists may start to terrorise the nationalist community again. But to what end? During the Troubles, the rationale and justification given by loyalists for harassing and murdering a civilian population was so that that terrorised civilian population pressured the IRA to stop. It's difficult to imagine a more idiotic or counterproductive strategy, but apparently some loyalists did believe this.
But there is no IRA. So would loyalists be killing politically uninvolved civilians to pressure them into pressuring the British government not to be democratic? It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Dr Coulter expresses the 'traditional' Protestant-Unionist approach to history where it appears the past is never past and nothing has ever 'really' changed, so to speak. Thus, even now in 2023, he describes or defines Sinn Fein as "the political wing of the Provisional IRA." Who else in the entire world still thinks of Sinn Fein that way? In fact, most people younger than 50 around the world probably wouldn't know enough history to even know the Sinn Fein they hear of today was ever connected to the PIRA. LOL. But it demonstrates a fundamental reality; for Northern Ireland Protestant-Unionists, Sinn Fein will never be anything more or less than "the political wing of the IRA" - that is, the political wing of a (to them) paramilitary "terrorist" organization. As long as Dr Coulter and his people take this attitude, any form of stable "power-sharing" co-governance in Northern Ireland is impossible.
ReplyDeleteThanks Dr Coulter, I always learn something from your columns about the Protestant-Unionist perspective which helps me understand them better. But your farcical definition of Sinn Fein as "the political wing of the Provisional IRA" stunned me. I'm sorry, but what century are you living in, John? It reveals something important but sad about the Protestant-Unionist 'community' in Northern Ireland: They will never see or interact with with Sinn Fein as anything more or less than the political wing of a paramilitary "terrorist" organization, and not as the freely elected democratic representatives of the (now majority) Irish Catholic 'community.' As long as they take that attitude, there is no chance of stable "power-sharing" co-governance in Northern Ireland.
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