Faithful Tribe; The Loyal Institutions

Author: Edwards, Ruth Dudley

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Ruth Dudley Edwards is a remarkable woman. She needs to be to write a book like this. No group within British society is so offensive to bien-pensant opinion as the Orangemen of Northern Ireland. And yet few books published this year will have the charm, learning, wisdom and humanity of The Faithful Tribe.

Dudley Edwards, raised a Roman Catholic in Dublin, is an atheist intellectual, crime novelist and historian of The Economist. Part Voltaire, part G.K. Chesterton and altogether beguiling as a writer, she has set herself the most difficult of tasks in this book, a blend of history, sociological fieldwork and reportage. But it is much more than the sum of those scholarly parts. It is, as the subtitle proclaims, an intimate portrait of the loyal institutions of Northern Ireland. Dudley Edwards writes of Ulster's Protestant society with a sympathy which runs quite contrary to contemporary liberal prejudice. The book is much the better for it.

There is something bogus about those histories, like Tim Pat Coogan's chronicle of the Troubles, which affect objectivity but are the product of fierce partisanship. Much better to read Kevin Toolis's Rebel Hearts, the work of an overt republican sympathiser who makes a virtue of his engagement without surrendering his judgment. In the same, but much less bloody vein, Dudley Edwards's bias towards understanding the world from an Orange point of view makes her work a compelling read.

For the members of the Orange Order, and its brother institutions, the Royal Black and the Apprentice Boys of Derry, deserve our sympathy. As Dudley Edwards points out, they would never solicit it.Unlike Irish nationalists, there is a moral reluctance in the Protestant culture to erect myths of victimhood in order to secure political advantage. The Loyal Institutions have been caricatured as proto-fascist broederbonds. But their leaders have declined to make their case. Now Dudley Edwards has done it for them.

She shows that the Loyal Institutions evolved to defend Enlightenment principles and members have to affirm their belief in religious tolerance. It is hard to think of another forum in which thousands of working-class Britons meet to socialise without alcohol, let alone one where religious and constitutional traditions are objects of active veneration. The members of the Orange Order tend to be quiet patriots. But there is nothing which so enrages contemporary metropolitan élites as working-class men who regard the Union Jack with unmixed pride.

Irish republicans have exploited that knowledge to disrupt the traditional marches which the Loyal Institutions arrange throughout the summer. The Orangemen feel the need to march to proclaim their identity because it is under threat. And their Britishness is endangered specifically because of successive British Governments' short-sighted appeasement of the IRA.

The IRA has, in turn, sought to exploit that appeasement by manufacturing opposition to Orange marches. As Dudley Edwards shows, the tension at Drumcree and other areas is a product of IRA intimidation, and not spontaneous local anger. Traditional freedoms have been curtailed as a consequence of a terrorist campaign.

The next few months in Northern Ireland look likely to be a perilous time and Drumcree could be the crucible. Any attempt to understand, let alone explain, the current agonies of Ulster which does not draw on Dudley Edwards's work is bound to be inadequate. The depth of her learning, and the breadth of her sympathy, make this a compelling book, the product of genuine free thinking and spare, fine writing.