The faithful Tribe, which the cover describes as "An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions", is a serious contribution to the understanding of Northern Ireland's political difficulties, both past and present. With A.T.Q Stewart's Narrow Ground and Clare O'Halloran's Partition and the Limits of Irish Nationalism, it completes a trilogy of books that ought to be required reading for all students of Irish politics. To Stewart's classic style and historical perspective, and O'Halloran's intellectual dissections of nationalist stereotypes of Northern Unionists, the author brings a combination of anecdote and commentary that is full of human understanding and insight.
Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is the manner in which it invests the "Orangeman" with both humanity and humour. Ruth Dudley Edwards exhibits the qualities and skills of both the journalist and the historian in making this book a unique amalgam of political reportage, contemporary anecdote and historical analysis. The past and present are woven together in a seamless web that emphasises the relevance of both. Those, like Tony Blair, who would have the past consigned to "the memory hole" need to be reminded that a people without a past have no future - an adage that is not wasted upon Northern Ireland unionists.
Irish nationalism has displayed a positive genius for creating a mythology about its self-appointed heroes and for demonising those who oppose it. The Orange Order and its associated institutions have long since been consigned, with the RUC, to the first circle of republicanism's inferno. Television images of grim-faced octogenarians, be-sashed and bowler-hatted, coupled with Kick the Pope bands, have long served the British and Irish media as the conditioning prelude to some blatantly biased political programme denigrating unionists. As the author points out, the flood of anti-orange propaganda commenced with the creation of the institution, and has continued unabated to the present day.
Clare O'Halloran has demonstrated that the stereotype of the bigoted Orangemen, though based on factual elements of Protestant supremacy and hostility to Catholicism, nevertheless enabled nationalists to dismiss the validity of unionist opposition to Irish nationalism by reducing their motives to mere trivial superstition. In a compelling chapter about the treatment of the minority Protestant community in both the Irish Free State and the Republic, Ruth Dudley Edwards brings into sharp focus the very rational grounds for the unionist political antipathy to Irish unity.
The great success of republican propaganda has been to equate political unionism with religious intolerance and bigotry in the minds of the Protestant middle and professional classes, who have distanced themselves from the Loyal Institutions. The patronising and dismissive attitude to the Twelfth Parade of David Cook, former Alliance Lord Mayor of Belfast, is held to be common among middle-class Protestants whose liberalism, according to the author, does not extend to trying to understand the ordinary Orangeman. Perhaps that is why the Alliance Party is now in terminal decline, as the Peace Process achieves not peace, but the almost total polarisation of the two communities in Northern Ireland, and reduces the centre to an ever-diminishing narrow ground.
The first two-thirds of this substantial work are occupied with the origins, history, and political ethos of the Loyal Institutions. The skilful interlacing of current interviews and anecdotes with historical references to the past builds up a human and three-dimensional picture of the institutions and those who belong to them. People with real strengths and human frailties emerge, whose characters have been shaped by their common history, loyalties, culture, religion and place. A picture takes shape of a people who feel that they do stand alone, and that the British Government to whom they have given their allegiance and their trust is in the process of betraying them in its own self-interest. The Orangeman cannot bomb Britain into keeping him, but the Republican can bomb London into dispensing with the Orangeman. His loyalty and his sacrifice are no longer a valuable asset to a country which now has no selfish, economic or strategic interest in what he has to offer.
THE final chapters, which relate to the Drumcree crisis, crystallise, in one sense, the fears of the Orangeman and of the unionist community with which he is so closely linked. He has marched this route for 200 years. He asks only to be allowed, once per year for twenty minutes, to continue his tradition. He has accepted all reasonable conditions in terms of how the parade is to be conducted; yet, by the threat of violence not only on Garvaghy Road, but perhaps on the British mainland, his right to a lawful parade, which is an integral part of his culture, is to be denied.
Those who dismiss the Orangeman's case as an intransigent determination to impose his view upon others miss the point, both of pluralism and culture. They ignore the fact that confrontations of this kind are the product of premeditated agitation by Sinn Fein/IRA, specifically designed to foment communal violence and to draw the Orangeman into collision with the RUC or, alternatively, to have the latter portrayed as the oppressors of the nationalist community.
Ruth Dudley Edwards is to be congratulated for presenting a picture of the Orangeman which he has never been able to effectively present for himself. The author is clearly an enthusiast and there will, doubtless, be those who will unfairly suggest that she has written this book with all the zeal of the convert. But perhaps sympathetic objectivity might best describe its ambience. Certainly, on reading the opening chapters, one felt that the Orangeman was being observed by a somewhat benign Victorian anthropologist as a kind of political noble savage. If so, let us hope that the world is more mindful now than it was then about the necessity of respecting and preserving a culture, a way of life, and an identity, even if they happen to belong to an Orangeman.
Bob Mc Cartney, QC MP, is the leader of the UK Unionist Party