Orange Hate Video - The Portadown Connection
It didn’t take long to establish that some of the individuals who appeared in the Orange hate video ‘singing’ about Michaela McAreavey are connected to Orange Lodges in Portadown. Most people will not be surprised.
For those who are surprised, shocked or even stunned at such behaviour, perhaps a recap of the inglorious history of the Orange Order in Portadown is required.
John Bell, Andrew McDade and Richard Beattie - all three are Portadown-based and all three have issued apologies for their participation in the Orange hate video
The first ever Orange service and 'church parade' at Drumcree in Portadown was on 1st July, 1795. That first Sunday church parade, like so many since, was celebrated with 'wrecking' and bloodletting in the parish of Drumcree.
On page seventeen of his History of Ireland (Vol. I), published in 1809, the historian Francis Plowden described the events that followed the Rev Devine's sermon:
“This evangelical labourer in the vineyard of the Lord of peace so worked up the minds of his audience, that upon retiring from service, on the different roads leading to their respective homes, they gave full scope to the anti-papistical zeal, with which he had inspired them, falling upon every Catholic they met, beating and bruising them without provocation or distinction, breaking the doors and windows of their houses, and actually murdering two unoffending Catholics in a bog. This unprovoked atrocity of the Protestants revived and redoubled religious rancour. The flame spread and threatened a contest of extermination”.
Over the months that followed, an estimated 7,000 Catholics were forced from their homes across North Armagh by a wave of terror, violence and murder.
The ‘outrages’ and killings which arose from Orange Order marches and meetings in the Portadown area in the late 18th century would continue all through the 19th and 20th centuries. Members of the local Catholic/Nationalist community were routinely verbally abused, physically attacked, and murdered by participants in those marches.
The Civil Rights campaign of the late 1960s and early 1970s began a process which cut away at the sectarian foundations of the Orange state
Until the victories achieved through the civil rights campaigns of the late 1960s and 1970’s, preferential treatment in terms of employment and housing was a given for rank-and-file members of the Orange Order and their families. Job advertisements in newspapers routinely carried the rider "No Catholic Need Apply".
In July 1972, the annual Portadown Orange march through Obins Street (the Tunnel) to Drumcree and returning via the Garvaghy Road was openly accompanied by dozens of masked and uniformed members of the UDA – an organisation actively engaged in a campaign of sectarian murder across the Six Counties and beyond.
In that same month, Catholic pub-owner Jack McCabe was shot dead along with one of customers, William Cochrane, by a UVF gunman in Portadown centre on 12th July.
Three days later, Felix Hughes (35), was kidnapped, tortured and shot dead by the UDA in Portadown. His body was not found until 4th August in a drainage ditch at Hoy's Meadow, leading to the river Bann.
Also in August 1972, the body of Eamon McMahon (19), was in the River Bann at Portadown. He had been tied up and beaten to death by members of the UDA.
There were many others murdered by unionist death squads in Portadown and surrounding areas throughout the 1970’s and 80’s. Indeed so many murders were committed in this area it became infamously known as “The Murder Triangle”.
Davide Trimble and Ian Paisley, then leaders of the two largest unionist parties, hand-in-hand in triumph and glee after marching through the nationalist Garvaghy Road community in Portadown
And let’s not forget Portadown and Drumcree in the 1990’s and the early part of this century - when the leaders of Unionism stood shoulder to shoulder with the leaders of the Orange Order in Portadown and their not-so-secret meetings with Billy Wright and his death squads.
Later, the leader of the Orange Order in Portadown, Harold Gracey, would openly stand on a public platform and give his full support to Wright.
Who still remembers the murder of the Lurgan taxi-driver, son, husband and father, Michel McGoldrick at the height of the 1996 Drumcree standoff?
Or the tragic death of twelve-year-old Darren Murray in October 1996, who died after he was struck by a car close to Corcrain Orange Hall in Portadown as he tried to escape from a unionist gang who had targeted him because of his skin colour and religion?
Or the beating to death of Robert Hamill in 1997 on the main street of Portadown while the RUC looked on – or the subsequent cover-up of that murder?
Even after the Mississippi-style murders of the three Quinn boys in 1998, Portadown Orangemen remained aloof and unwavering at Drumcree – “nothing to do with us” was their oft-repeated refrain.
Let us never forget the murder of Rosemary Nelson by a unionist death squad in Lurgan in 1999 - targeted because she was the legal representative of the Garvaghy Road residents and the Hamill family.
Solicitor Rosemary Nelson died after a bomb, planted by a Unionist death squad, detonated under her car
On the night before her funeral, scores of Orangemen and their supporters gathered outside Portadown’s Corcrain Orange Hall, openly mocking and taunting local Catholic residents about her death.
The links between Orangeism, ‘moderate’ unionism and the unionist death squads in the Portadown area are well-known and well-documented.
Perhaps not as well-known are the well-established links between the Orange and the National Front, Combat 18, Britain First, BNP, UKIP, Patriotic Alternative and other far-right organisations.
The recent revolting video involving members of the Orange Order from Portadown is not a one-off aberration, although some will present, and excuse, it as such.
No. It is part of a mindset that has been nurtured, supported, funded and excused by those in authority for over two centuries. It is a mindset which is based on the “God-given right” of one group of people to exercise their dominance, supremacy and ascendancy over another.
In other countries, such mindsets and beliefs are correctly termed extreme far-right, racist, and fascist. No excuses are tolerated. Unfortunately, in Ireland and particularly in the Six Counties, such mindsets are excused and pandered to by the political establishment.
Some of those who featured in the Orange hate video have since issued public apologies for their actions. In truth they are only sorry that their naked sectarian hatred was caught on camera and broadcast to the world.
Nobody should be taken in by these fake apologies. The deep hatred that has fuelled Orangism for more than two centuries will outlast the current outrage. Of that there is no doubt.
And it will continuously reemerge with deadly consequence in Portadown and elsewhere for as long as the Irish and British political establishments pander to the Orange Order and their sectarian, racist, far-right ideology.