Welcome for Orange Order is one step on long journey

THE ballroom in Leinster House is as appropriate a place as any to receive the grandmaster of the Orange Order Edward Stevenson at noon today.

Home to Seanad Éireann, itself threatened with extinction, the ballroom-cum-parliamentary chamber is in a sense a crossroads of Irish Protestantism.

The magnificently ornate ceiling, echoing the motifs of classical antiquity, is an expression of the pretensions of the Protestant ascendency in the age of reason. Eighteenth-century élites turned to the rational neo-classical style of decoration to express their affinity with the Enlightenment. The duke of Leinster followed the fashion.

That enlightenment, based on reason, destabilised irrational religion and undermined divinely-anointed monarchy. It bred radicalism and revolution, first in America and then in France. In Ireland, the Patriot Party of Henry Grattan was one, albeit moderate, expression of the spirit of the age. The United Irishmen would in time be a far more radical one.

Edward Fitzgerald, whose family home was Leinster House, became an icon of radical and revolutionary Irish Protestantism in the 1790s. It was at that time and in those circumstances that the Orange Order was born. If Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, and the United Irishmen are most famously remembered today, a sizeable part of the Catholic population and majority of Protestants did not share their radical egalitarianism. Their rebellion failed and their ideology, if powerful, was not always influential.

In 1795, as tensions mounted, a clash occurred called the Battle of the Diamond in Co Armagh. It was a nasty scuffle involving Catholic Defenders and local Protestants. It did, however, give birth to the Orange Order. If the Seanad chamber is a backdrop for the Protestant Enlightenment in Ireland, the order can be viewed, as one historian remarked, as the key force of counter-revolution. It was the political genius of the order that it could hold dukes and dustmen in its popular but sectarian embrace.

Since 1798 it has been a bulwark of political Protestantism. In the 19th century it successfully saw off Home Rule until radical nationalism no longer believed in it. Easter 1916 was the explosive result and partition an enduring consequence. In the battle against Home Rule, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) was born out of the Orange Order in 1905. The nexus of both, until its severing asunder in 2005, was the mainstay of James Craig’s Protestant state for a Protestant people. By then the Good Friday Agreement had seriously undermined Orange confidence in the UUP. The party was in any event crumbling.

If the political influence of the Orange Order has arguably been in slow decline since the introduction of direct rule in the 1970s, it remains the largest civil society organisation in Northern Ireland. And it is and always has been active in the South, both before and since 1922.

The grandmaster will be accompanied by his deputy, the grand secretary Drew Nelson, who will address the Seanad and grandmasters from Cavan, Monaghan, Leitrim, and Donegal.

The Orange Order in the Republic is a political dialect that has only been spoken sotto voce among its own members, and remains almost unknown outside them. Today’s audience in the Seanad is an important re-emergence of an identity submerged from public view. It was only in May 2000 that a plaque on Dublin’s Dawson St to commemorate the founding of the Orange Order caused political and public uproar.

Today’s event takes place in the aftermath of Queen Elizabeth’s visit and all that it signified for the normalisation of relations between Britain and Ireland. Speaking last year in Rossnowlagh, Co Donegal, at the Republic’s only Orange Parade, the grandmaster said: “We are in the Irish Republic but we are celebrating our British culture and identity.”

Edward Stevenson and his colleagues had been in Dublin for the royal visit and saw firsthand the enthusiastic reception. If we in the Republic appropriately insist on the right of nationalists in Northern Ireland to celebrate and legitimate their Irish identity, it is a new challenge for us to facilitate the active as distinct from historical British identity of a minority of our own fellow citizens.

And more vital than a sense of British identity for some, is a Protestant identity for very many more. A key issue for the Orange Order in the Republic, as well as the wider Protestant population, is the future of denominational education. In a secularising society we should not make the mistake of thinking that indifference is an acceptable replacement for indoctrination. It was in Protestant schools, in hospitals like the Adelaide, and in Trinity College that the Protestant identity was kept alive during decades of Catholic fervour.

And Seanad Éireann was the one place where from WB Yeats to Mary Robinson there was consistent representation of different voices, including Protestant and northern ones. It is only another form of arrogance to propose that secularism should replace Catholicism as the dominant motif of our society without pausing to make room for Protestantism.

The centenary of the Third Home Rule Bill this year began a decade of commemoration. Next year will mark the 1913 Lock Out, then 1916, the Great War, the Treaty, and the Free State 1922; 2017 will mark an anniversary of enormous consequence for the island — the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

Perhaps the Seanad, an endangered institution, could ally with the national cultural institutions whose own independence is ironically threatened by bureaucratic homogenisation to appropriately commemorate the Reformation in Ireland.

Ireland is the one place in Europe where there was never a final truce between Reformation and counter-reformation. The irony now is that moral relativism and blinding indifference is a greater threat to both than either ever was to each other.

The Orange Order may not accept it, but the Good Friday Agreement is a basis for an emerging mutual esteem. The Seanad has long been home to a liberal Protestant tradition. Today it will welcome a more robust one. Grandmasters are no strangers to the ballrooms in great houses.

* Gerard Howlin is a public affairs consultant and was a government adviser from 1997 to 2007