Word: orangemens
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...Northern Ireland, the alienation of the Catholic third of the population is very nearly total. Adding to Britain's problems is the ever-present danger of a Protestant backlash. The Orangemen have been remarkably quiescent during the recent weeks of violence and terror, but militant Protestants were angry and restive over the Catholics' success at Newry in defying the Ulster government's ban on parades and demonstrations. Last week William Craig, a leader of hard-line members of the ruling Unionist Party, announced the formation of the "Ulster Vanguard," whose 60,000 members, he said, were prepared...
...applicants than they can possibly train. Internment had confirmed the Catholics' worst fears about the Protestant-dominated Stormont government: that its ultimate answer to Catholic political and civil rights demands would be naked sectarian repression. No Unionist Prime Minister, they feel, can ever survive while ignoring the extremist Orangemen's call to "make the Croppies [Catholics] lie down." For Catholics, the Derry shootings have now added weight to the I.R.A.'s claim that the real enemy is the British government at Westminster. Says Oliver Napier, vice chairman of the nonsectarian Alliance Party: "Sooner or later, [the I.R.A...
...always Ulster, whose Protestants feared the consequences of any kind of separation from England. In 1886, Gladstone's government was defeated on the Home Rule issue by the Tories, the most vocal of whom was Lord Randolph Churchill (Sir Winston's father), who coined a ringing slogan that ardent Orangemen still remember today: "Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right...
...Third Force." Not that Ulster's Orangemen were exactly waving the olive branch. Cries mounted last week for an armed "third force"-in addition to the British army and the overwhelmingly Protestant but unarmed Royal Ulster Constabulary-to fight the terrorists of the outlawed Irish Republican Army. One afternoon, in Ulster's largest hard-hat demonstration to date, over 20,000 Protestant workers assembled in a Belfast park to hear calls for "lead bullets, not rubber ones"-a reference to the rubber bullets the British soldiers use in trying to restore order. The crowd cheered wildly...
Basically, the tragedy of Northern Ireland is rooted in the 17th century and not the 20th. Protestant Orangemen still commemorate the victory of the Protestant William of Orange in 1690 in the Battle of the Boyne; in Londonderry the annual Apprentice Boys parade memorializes the young apprentices who closed the city gates against the forces of the Catholic King James II in 1688. Such celebrations are not merely reminders of a rich heritage; they are also reassertions of dominance over the Catholics of the north and of vigilance against the Catholics of the south. Both of Northern Ireland...