ON Easter Monday youths gripping their off licence carry outs spilled out of a van outside my Belfast house to join others racing towards the Ormeau Bridge.
By engaging the RUC in conflict they were getting the same kind of buzz they would find in a football ground fracas. That was not true of the Orangemen who vainly demanded a right of passage down their traditional route towards the city centre. The blocking of the bridge was yet another outward visible sign that they had lost ground.
The little kitchen and parlour houses of the lower Ormeau Road were once occupied by Protestants employed in their hundreds in the gasworks, the bakeries and the brickworks. Now Tricolours on the lamp standards proclaimed that these narrow streets had become the territory of "incomers", as the Rev Martin Smyth MP described the Catholics who had moved in after the massive population movements of 1969 and 1971.
Today it is all too easy to forget that the Orange Order marches in celebration - celebration that the British colony survived the massacres of 1641, that loyalists saved the Protestant constitution by their epic defence of Derry through 105 days of siege, and that Protestants again and again successfully defended their liberties and were delivered from Popish domination.
At their best, Orange parades rival Mardi Gras festivals in splendour as Peter Millar of the Times observed on and about the 12th of July: You can love it or loathe it, but it beats the hell out of Morris dancing." I know many Catholics who, before the Troubles began, used to rush down the Falls Road to watch the bands.
Orange parades, at least in Belfast, are not what they were. They have suffered the slow corrosive impact of package holidays and middle class fastidiousness. Only a few of the magnificent silver bands are left and the "kilties" with skirling pipes are being supplanted by growing numbers of fife and drum "kick the Pope" bands.
Yet the numbers involved are still very large. Around 100,000 people - about one fifteenth of the population of Northern Ireland - take part in the Twelfth parades. In 1992 there were 2,744 parades and demonstrations, 2,498 described by the RUC as loyalist, and there will probably be as many in 1996.
These days there is an increasing element of strain in Orange celebration. More than ever before in this century, the Orangemen march to assert their territorial imperative.
All around they see their territory being eroded. The Catholic population of south Belfast is rising fast; Ardoyne, once a beleaguered Catholic island is now connected by broad corridors to the Antrim Road; swathes of rural borderland have been abandoned; and save for the cosseted Fountain protectorate, Protestants in Derry have decamped to the Waterside. If the Protestants move any further east, a Catholic colleague observed, they will topple into the Irish Sea.
OUTSIDE the leafy bourgeois suburbs, Northern Ireland is made up of stinct territories of one sect or another owing to "the dearth of major atheist settlements", as Prof Joe Lee puts it. Protestants can see only that their enclaves are contracting or being lost.
The tradition of marching to mark out territory goes back more than 300 years. The convulsions of the 17th century meant that every able bodied Protestant had to be ready 19 march in arms to the sound of fife and drum at the first call.
William's war was concluded by the Battle of Aughrim, fought on the limestone plain of east Galway on July 12th, 1691. That was the bloodiest battle ever fought on Irish soil: 7,000 Irishmen died in an afternoon, 5,800 more than were killed at Culloden in 1746.
News of that victory was signalled by the burning of beacons from hill to hill and celebrated by exuberant marching, and for every year thereafter. Celebration, triumphalism and territorial marking blended together.
Even in the long peace after Aughrim regular musters of loyalists were required, for example, during the Jacobite scares of 1715 and Thurot's occupation of Carrickfergus in 1760. The defence of Ireland against the French during the American revolution depended on 40,000 volunteers, 20,000 of them in Ulster. Eoin MacNeill traced the ancestry of his Irish Volunteers, formed in 1913, back to them; the Orange Order with greater justification could do so.
Like the 18th century Volunteers, the Orangemen march to fife and drum and carry banners before them. Provocative marching by Volunteer corps in Co Armagh intensified the bitter sectarian warfare west of the Bann which culminated in the Battle, of the Diamond and the formation of the Orange Order in September 1795. An early decision was to celebrate July 12th annually by parades.
Volunteers in Antrim and Down, where Catholics were docile and in a small minority, could afford to challenge the Ascendancy and flirt with sedition. In the 19th century the Great Famine and the industrialisation of Belfast changed all that.
Protestants and Catholics poured into Belfast, the fastest growing centre in the United Kingdom, bringing their traditional rivalries with them from central Ulster. They settled in distinct enclaves and, along the unstable frontiers between them, fierce rioting ensued, usually during the marching season.
Catholic funerals and Orange parades were used to mark out territory. In an attempt to stem the rising tide of Catholic nationalism the Orange Order discovered the effectiveness of the parade as a counter demonstration. By such means Daniel O'Connell was forced to flee Belfast in 1841.
One of the bloodiest encounters of the 19th century, Dolly's Brae, was the result of Orangemen marching on July 12th, 1849, well off their route into a Catholic district. That resulted in a government ban on parades, not lifted until 1872.
"Grown men! Pathetic! Ridiculous!" Lieut Gen Sir Ian Freeland, the British army GOC remarked on seeing traditional parades in 1969. More than ever the loyalists feel the contempt of the British on the other side of the Irish Sea.
YET Protestant culture is essentially British culture, indistinguishable from that, say, in Bristol.
Much of it is transnational and shared with Catholics, and includes Blur, Oasis, Home and Away and Neighbours.
So loyalists cling to distinctive elements which revolve around marching bands and parades. "We feel that our culture and identity is being crushed, while we have Irish culture rammed down our throats," David Trimble wrote immediately after the "Siege of Drumcree".
For the past 25 years Protestants have felt themselves to be in a permanent retreat. They have experienced the loss of Stormont; the collapse of traditional and multinational firms which employed them; the most draconian fair employment legislation in western Europe which stops them being "spoken for" when seeking work; the imposition of an international "diktat" in 1985, when despite loyalist protest the Anglo Irish Agreement gave the Republic a say in Northern Ireland's affairs; John Major's statement that Britain no longer had a strategic or economic interest in the region; and Tricolours and street signs in Irish no longer torn down by the RUC.
In the past week litter bins over much of Belfast have sprouted neatly lettered labels saying Bruscar ("litter" in the Irish language). To Protestants, it seems like a sign of the times. Celebrations Orange marches may be, but increasingly they are a collective and determined attempt to hold the line.
