15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
I am a Catholic so why do I feel empathy for the Orange Lodge?
When, at last they rounded the corner, and strode into view your senses danced with the spectacle. Nothing you'd ever seen or heard before those first moments was anything like this. The closest perhaps might have been a circus parade scene in a film.
There was always a thin little man who'd hurl a long metal baton high into the air and then twist and twirl and pirouette before catching it behind his back. He never dropped it. There were large banners from places such as Bridgeton and Larkhall and Thornliebank that you thought you might have heard cropping up occasionally when the men drank beer at communions and baptisms.
Now read Kevin's full piece
The Orangemen marched in disciplined lines in crisp, white, short-sleeved shirts, the older ones in hats and black suits and the women all wearing fancy wedding hats and handbags. They all seemed serious about what they were doing. The young men swaggered.
If the term 'woke' had existed back in the late 1960s, it might accurately have been applied to my late dad, Joe. Back then 'woke' meant using the aphorism 'a bit light on his loafers' rather than anything more brutal.
It was Joe who first explained to me the reality of apartheid in South Africa when the BBC began to transmit pictures of police brutality in black townships. He hated bullying and urged us always to be kind to the oddballs and awkwards whom we realised many years later were probably neuro-divergent.
And he never said anything bad about the Orangemen, choosing to say they believed in Jesus but not so much in Mary and the saints, 'but that didn't make them bad people'. Then one day, my rascally uncle told me 'they hated Catholics' and Joe went through him: the first time I'd ever heard him argue with another grown up in my presence.
Even as innocence gave way to experience and fear and mistrust and dodgy songs about King Billy at Celtic Park, I never lost that thrill on hearing The Sash being belted out by fifes and drums and wee contortionists dancing beneath their airborne sticks.
