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.