David Trimble, leader of the Official Unionist Party, claimed this summer that the Orange Order was no more sectarian in outlook than the Girl Guides. You can be a Catholic and be a member of the girl guides. If you're old enough you can marry a catholic. You can even go to a Catholic wedding. You can do none of these things if you are a member of the Orange Order. As Eamonn McCann pointed out in the Independent, shrieking little girls in berets and ankle socks have never stormed Derry's Bogside carrying cudgels shouting, 'Kill the Fenian bastards.' But that is exactly what members of the Orange Order and the Apprentice Boys did on 12 August 1969 the events which set Northern Ireland alight.
Each year there are over 2,000 Orange marches held in Northern Ireland. It has become common to refer to these marches as being somehow part of the Protestant 'culture' of Northern Ireland. Indeed this was the view put forward by Mitchell McLoughlin of Sinn Fein on BBC radio at the time of the confrontation in Portadown in July.
These marches have nothing to do with culture. A leading Orangeman and historian of the Order, John Brown, summed up the importance of these marches: 'On 12 July and other occasions the Orangeman marched with his lodge behind its flags and drums to show his strength in the places where he thought it would do most good. Where you could walk you could dominate and other things followed.'
What do the words 'dominate and other things' really mean? In 1960 after the Orange Order had marched through the overwhelmingly Catholic town of Dungiven, the same John Brown said, 'There is no such thing as a Nationalist district Dungiven has been restored to the Queen's Dominions.' Last year Ian Paisley said that the right of Orangemen to march down Portadown's Garvaghy Road was 'a matter of life or death, of Ulster or the Irish Republic, freedom or slavery, light or darkness.'
The reality of the marching season came in an interview this July in the Irish Times with a Catholic resident of Torrens Drive in North Belfast's Cliftonville area about what happened when a Loyalist parade came down her street. She said: 'The crowd came down the street and started banging on the door. We were lying down on the floor with our feet against it when the brick came through the window. They threw a child's bike through the front window. There was a crowd of women across the street screaming they were going to kill us.'
This woman's house is yards away from Oldpark RUC barracks. The police, rather than doing anything about the Orange mob, suggested the woman and her three children get out. They left with what they could carry. Another woman who moved into the Torrens area because she wanted her children to be brought up in a mixed area reported, 'At 1am women were marching up and down across the road singing Loyalist songs.' Again she phoned the RUC but they refused to do anything about the intimidation. She too left with what she could carry. This has nothing to do with culture. It is more like the Ku Klux Klan's night riding in the southern states of America.
When the RUC and the British army smashed a way through Portadown's Garvaghy Road for Orange marchers last July, using plastic bullets on Catholic residents, it showed that what socialists have said for 30 years about the Northern Ireland state runs true. This is a political slum which cannot be reformed. It's a state based on sectarianism, and the true nature of that state was shown in Portadown.
Whatever is happening with the peace talks, they can do nothing about the reality of that sectarian state. While the RUC remains, while that sectarian state remains, there will be no fundamental reforms.
Watching the RUC and army smash their way into the Garvaghy road must have revived memories of events nearly 30 years earlier, on 12 August 1969, when the RUC tried to baton Catholic protesters off the streets of Derry to clear the way for an Apprentice Boys march. For a year civil rights marches had been either banned or batoned off the streets.
In his book, The Orange State, Michael Farrell reminds us of the reality of the annual Apprentice Boys march:
'When thousands of Orangemen from all over the North would come to Derry, to parade through the city and around the walls overlooking the Bogside to commemorate the siege [of 1689]. It was virtually a direct celebration of the plantation and the Protestant ascendancy and served as a yearly reminder to the Catholic population of who was master even in this Catholic city.'
In August 1969 the Bogside fought back. The RUC was beaten back. The Northern Ireland interior minister urgently requested troops. A Labour government took the decision to commit those troops, not to keep the peace but to back up the RUC. It was that incident which triggered the three decades of troubles that followed.
In 1996, why did the British government take the decision to force an Orange march through a Catholic estate? Nothing was more calculated to ruin the relationship with the Dublin government or the Clinton administration. No decision could have benefited Sinn Fein and the IRA more.
The answer is the same answer as to why the British government placed an obstacle in the way at every stage of the peace process since the IRA declared a ceasefire back in 1994. It's the same answer as to why it demanded the republicans alone disarm, why it dragged in, with reference to no one, the creation of a Northern Ireland assembly, why it wouldn't even accept the IRA ceasefire for months.
The answer is simple. John Major's friends in the North are the Unionists. In order to survive he needs their votes. The British ruling class has got nothing but derision for these Orange bigots, but when it comes to the narrow arithmetic of keeping a Tory government in the House of Commons, the peace process can go to hell. For that cynical reason Major sacrificed the peace process and took a decision over Portadown which threatened to turn the situation back to 1969.
Except there is no going back to the pre-1969 situation. Firstly the British government stands isolated. It has gone from being a second rate power in the world to being a fourth rate power. Secondly the Catholic working class got off its knees in 1969 and will not get back on them. Thirdly there can be no return to the pre-1969 days of Unionist dictatorship. For there were at most 10,000 orangemen outside Drumcree church in Portadown. This was not 1969. This was not 1974 when the Ulster Workers' Council strike brought down a Northern Ireland executive composed of Unionists and the SDLP. This was not even on the scale of the protests against the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement which failed to shift the British government.
The Unionist monolith has fractured for ever. The old days of one Unionist party with the Orange Lodge behind it which could mobilise much of the Protestant working class has gone for ever. All the king's horses and all the king's men cannot put Humpty Dumpty together again.
The siege of Drumcree was not the response of a confident community. This isn't a community that feels the winds of destiny in its sails. This is a response of people hanging on to symbols because it is all they have left. Fintan O'Toole put it well in the Guardian:
'Orangeism far from being a continuous link with the past, has mattered to most Ulster Protestants only at times of political uncertainty...the other great strength of Orangeism is its ability to present an appearance of unity at times of division within both Ulster Protestantism and Ulster Unionism.'
The Orange Order is not some ancient institution which dates back over centuries. It originated in the 1790s and was reinvented in the 1880s. All the symbols Lambeg drums, bowler hats and the passing of resolutions at the end of marches date back to little over 100 years ago. It was a product of the mobilisations in the North of Ireland against Irish home rule at that time, which could win the support of what at the time was a bourgeoisie in Belfast which was historically confident.
For the majority of Ireland the 19th century was a disaster of famine and industrial decline. Belfast, however, was industrialised, tied to the Clyde and Mersey. By 1911 Harland and Wolff was the biggest shipyard in the world. Belfast had the biggest concentration of linen plants in the world, the single biggest linen mill in the world, the largest ropeworks in the world and the world's largest tobacco plant, Gallaher. It was also a political cockpit. Belfast's bosses saw their prosperity as linked to empire. Any proposal for Irish Home Rule threatened that in their eyes.
When the Unionist Party was formed in 1886, it was able to form an alliance with the Tories. When the Tory leader Lord Randolph Churchill came to Belfast he wrote, 'I decided some time ago that if Gladstone went for home rule, the Orange Card would be the one to play.' He visited Belfast to declare, 'Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right.'
That alliance between the Tories and the Unionist Party almost brought Britain to the verge of civil war in 1912-14 to stop a Liberal government implementing Home Rule. The Tories were even willing to help fund the import of guns from Germany to arm the Ulster Volunteer Force. This alliance was able to mobilise popular support using the Orange Order to fan the flames of sectarianism. The settlement of 1921, partition, helped remove Ireland as a factor which had polarised British politics for 30 years. When the Stormont regime was set up Northern Ireland seemed a vibrant industrial economy, integrated into the British imperial economy.
Today Unionists count for nothing apart from their votes in the House of Commons. The Northern Ireland economy is literally bankrupt and is reliant on British subsidies. The Northern Ireland state is maintained by British troops, administered by British politicians and civil servants. The responsibility for sectarianism rests squarely with them.
The history of this decline has seen the decline of the basis for Unionism and Orangeism. But the divide and rule benefited the ruling class, not Protestant workers. In the past skilled workers could earn wages on a par with their British counterparts but the majority of Protestant and Catholic workers were unskilled and they always earned considerably less than equivalent workers in Britain.
The myth of most Protestant workers being male and having jobs in Harland and Wolff for life is not the reality today. There are more women working than ever before. Protestant workers are more likely to work alongside Catholic workers in the public sector. Jobs are less secure and less well paid than they ever have been.
The Wall Street Journal gloats over the Northern Ireland workforce, saying, 'Some 70 percent of them are in low paying service jobs, meaning that the average male weekly earnings are 15 percent lower than in the rest of the UK.' In 1991 32.3 percent of households in Northern Ireland had weekly incomes of less than £125. The figure for England was 23.5 percent. In 1993 Save The Children reported that 139,000 children in Northern Ireland lived in poverty and concluded, 'No other region in the UK so clearly demonstrates that low wages, high unemployment and "good" industrial relations are not the path to economic prosperity.'
It is important to challenge the established view of Protestant privilege. Catholics suffer higher levels of unemployment and deprivation but a British government report on Belfast's Protestant Shankill Road found that male unemployment was 40 percent compared to a Belfast average of 19 percent. Female unemployment was 35 percent compared to a citywide average of 11 percent. The average weekly disposable income per family was less than £100. This is half the Northern Ireland average which in turn is 20 percent below the British average. A full 78 percent of households received social security benefits.
The reality of life in Northern Ireland creates the potential to challenge the old established ideas. The 1993 Social Attitudes In Northern Ireland reports that:
three quarters of Catholics and two thirds of Protestants want more cross-community contact.
70 percent of Catholics and 80 percent of Protestants want more integrated housing.
70 percent overall would like to live in a mixed area.
86 percent overall said they preferred a mixed workforce.
70 percent of both Catholics and Protestants want integrated education.
50 percent of Protestants and 49 percent of Catholics would prefer to send their children to mixed schools.
Attitudes on a wider level are remarkably similar to those reported in Britain with, for example, 92 percent opposed to any reduction in health or education expenditure. When asked what the government should spend money on, 68 percent chose health or education and just 3 percent opted for police, prisons or defence. As many as 70 percent agree that 'ordinary working people do not get their share of the nation's wealth'.
Workers in Northern Ireland are more likely to be in a trade union and more likely to be active in the union. One survey of industrial relations in the 1980s found that 'Northern Ireland is a relatively strike prone part of the UK.'
But that desire for class unity and integration is also accompanied by pessimism that such working class unity can be achieved. The tragic thing is that there is no force in the north coming forward to challenge bigotry. Sinn Fein accepts the idea that there are two communities with distinct identities cutting across classes. The whole Northern Ireland peace process rests on this assumption.
The trade union movement has an official policy of refusing to discuss political developments in Northern Ireland, arguing that to do otherwise would be to sow divisions among their members. If ever there was a moment for the trade unions to call for a show of unity against sectarianism, it was this summer, but the union leaders refused to lift a finger.
The emergence of new Loyalist parties, the PUP and UDP, holds possibilities and dangers. They have indulged in rhetoric about the Unionist 'fur coat brigade'.
Clearly that resentment about the bosses in the Unionist party shows the possibility of a step forward. But we have to argue against people on the left in Ireland and Britain who welcome this as a step towards socialist politics. It is not. These parties continue to start from the belief that Protestant workers have different interests from Catholics and that they represent their community rather than the wider working class. They still see Protestants in competition for jobs and services and do not in reality break from Unionist politics. That's why David Ervine talks of the wider 'Unionist family'.
During the confrontation in Portadown and in the run up to the Apprentice Boys march in Derry the media was full of warnings that Northern Ireland was on the road to becoming another Bosnia. Yet it is worth remembering where the drive for peace came from. It did not come from Gerry Adams, John Hume, Albert Reynolds or any of the other politicians who take credit for the peace process. In December 1993 it was ordinary rank and file workers who demonstrated in Belfast at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions rally for an end to the sectarian killings. In June 1994 it was Harland and Wolff workers who walked out over the murder of Maurice O'Kane in the shipyard.
There was a feeling then that enough was enough as people took to the streets demanding an end to the killing. The ceasefire has been popular amongst both Protestants and Catholics so much so that the loyalists were more or less forced into their ceasefire by the Protestant community after the IRA had declared theirs.
There is a possibility of building on that. But there is also the danger that, if it is not built on, things can slide backwards and the most dangerous elements within the Protestant working class can begin to gain a foothold.
We have to look at a different set of politics to take the situation forward. In 1934 Protestant and Catholic workers in Belfast joined together in building a common socialist organisation. The words of the editorial in their first paper echo through the years:
'Sectarianism dies slowly when the fight against it is one of words.Sectarianism burns out quickly when there is team work in common struggle... Those who see in partition the link between Irish Capitalism and Imperialist Finance, however, see in the common struggle for the Workers' Republic the solution of partition, and in the destruction of exploitation, the withering of sectarian strife.'
The real hope lies in building a genuine working class response to sectarianism, bigotry and repression, breaking from the politics of communalism which sees the two communities as being separate and hermetically sealed. The key to this process is socialist politics and socialist organisation.