Orange voices peal in protest

Faithful Tribe By Ruth Dudley Edwards(Harper Collins, #17.99) Reviewed by Willy Maley Orangeism is a subject that has to be handled with kid gloves - preferably white ones. Ruth Dudley Edwards has the grace and wit to do so. Difficult topics are best viewed from the inside, and by an outsider. On balance, Edwards has penned a fine free-ranging study, characterised by intimacy and understanding.

This is a substantial piece of work, lucid and accessible. The fruit of years of close contact and conversations, its strengths lie not just in the committed nature of its commentary, but in the endlessly fascinating and often enlightening interviews the author has conducted with members of the organisations involved.

This vox pop approach pays dividends. She amply illustrates that the Orange Order is about more than parades, and the parades themselves are seen by its members not as infringements of the civil rights of others, but as expressions of their own inalienable rights. Described on the dust jacket as hailing from a "Dublin Roman Catholic background", and in the accompanying press release as "an unlikely Joan of Arc for Orangemen", Edwards is the first woman to be made an honorary member of an Orange Order Lodge. There is admirable authority and insight in her arguments, and anger. Edwards is enraged at the "effrontery and laziness of mind" of her peers with regard to Loyalists. To say Orangeism has had a bad press is an understatement. A steady drizzle of poor publicity has rained on their parades, turning to a downpour in recent years. They have also been accused of being poor representatives of themselves, and thus of losing the media war. Edwards sets out, not to speak for loyalists, but to let their voices be heard. Thus we get a procession of views as authentic as they are entrenched. An English Orangeman speaks of the Blue Remembered Hills of his Sheffield youth in the 1950s, and says it makes him "angry that an entire community should be demonized for no greater crime than being out of fashion". Edwards asserts: "The Irish Catholic autocratic tradition has little in common with the divisive, dissenting, individualistic and ludicrously democratic cast of mind of Ulster Protestantism." As the marching season begins it's crucial to bear in mind there are more than two sides to every story. The road to peace and reconciliation is paved with good intentions. True respect comes through understanding one's own bias, rather than denouncing what one perceives as someone else's. In this regard, The Faithful Tribe ought to be read by anyone who wants to translate their prejudices into an understanding of a beleaguered minority tradition. This book offers a rosy-coloured view through the sash-window. In a climate of dourness, intransigence, and pessimism, its message is: the future's bright, the future's orange. In a multi-cultural, all- inclusive future, says Edwards, there must be a place for the faithful tribe. I have many reservations about her approach, but room to mention only four. First, she is much more acerbic about Irish Catholicism than Ulster Unionism. No-one is more anti-Catholic than a lapsed Catholic - as John Knox, King Billy and James Joyce attest. Secondly, despite her evident affinity for the folk with whom she has walked and talked, she shares that familiar middle-class Southern Irish disdain for the Scots. Thus, most of the negative images of Loyalists are of those from this side of the water, and the fondness with which the Ulster brogue is handled contrasts sharply with the short shrift given to "rasping Glaswegian accents". Edwards apparently wants to purify the dialect of the tribe. Edwards also mentions that No Pope of Rome was "like most modern hard-line sectarian songs... composed in Scotland", and to prove her point she cites ''the viciously sectarian Glasgow Orange song We are the Billy Boys". Two of the thousand threads that bind Scotland to Ireland are Orangemen and James Connolly: Ruth Dudley Edwards has written books on both. An old saying has it that "everybody's friend is nobody's friend", but as the biographer of Connolly, Edwards has already shown that it's her style to see her subject sympathetically. Ironically, that sympathy seems not to stretch to Scotland. Thirdly, Edwards is so steeped in her subject matter that she comes across as a knee-jerk reactionary. Her valid point about the vilification of Unionist politicians in the Dublin press segues into a diatribe against feminism, the tenuous link being that victims become persecutors, and this is "reminiscent of the way in which ... men are nowadays publicly routinely disparaged and traduced in terms which would never be tolerated the other way about". This kind of comment weakens her case. The final reservation concerns the title. "Tribe" plays on the old rhetoric that belittles distinctive cultural traditions as mere tribalism. Perhaps the publishers had the final say. Myths are more marketable than truths. I think The Faithful Tradition would have been a fairer and more faithful rendering. Dr Willy Maley lectures in English at the University of Glasgow. He describes his own tribal identity as a "Protestant Celtic supporter christened 'William Timothy'."

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