Speaking at Belfast's 'field', former United Unionist assembly member Frazer Agnew told the tiny minority of marchers who bothered to listen to the speeches: "Just as the Orange order dominated the first Ulster Unionist Council in 1905, it is ideally placed to exert its influence in bringing about a new and vibrant unionism."
Ah, 1905. Those were the days. A general election was in the air and it looked like the Conservatives would be walloped to be replaced by the Liberals. The Ulster Unionists dreaded them. They might push through Home Rule. Frazer Agnew knows a thing or two about the Orange Order for he writes and gives talks on it.
No wonder he looks back wistfully to 1905. Then, the grand master of the Grand Lodge of Ireland was John Henry Crichton, fourth Earl of Erne, former MP for Enniskillen. His family seat, Castle Crom, nestled in a 31,000-acre estate at Newtownbutler. The family also had 2,000 acres at Lough Mask, Co Mayo where in 1880 the third earl's estate agent, a certain Captain Boycott, ran into some local difficulties. In 1905 it was comforting to know that if the Liberals received a majority of votes from the men of Britain and Ireland, formed a government and had the temerity to introduce a Home Rule bill, the Earl of Erne and scores of like-minded peers would summarily toss it out of the House of Lords.
Not many earls in the Orange Order today eh? In fact not any earls. You wouldn't have spotted many brain surgeons plodding along the hot tarmac on Saturday either – none in fact. Even if there had been, it's hard to imagine any of them openly proclaiming their membership of the Orange Order. That's not because educated, professional people don't belong to bigoted, sectarian, racist organisations. They do – one of Hitler's proconsuls in Poland had three doctorates.
No, the reason no Protestant professional will admit to membership of the Orange Order is that in the last 15 years or so it has become synonymous with thuggery and lager louts, attacks on Catholics, the police and army, rioting, deaths and injury. The trouble surrounding Drumcree didn't begin in 1995, but has been going on sporadically since 1985 when an Orange march was rerouted from its traditional coat-trailing route along the Tunnel in Portadown so Orangemen could trail their coats past the newly built Catholic district of Garvaghy Road.
Time was when the majority of members of the UUC were Orangemen. Time was every Unionist MP at Stormont or Westminster was an Orangeman, had to be an Orangeman. Now we've reached the curious position where only anti-agreement UUP MPs turn up in fancy dress to speak at Orange fields.
As membership of the Orange order has slipped inexorably down the social scale its members naturally tend to incline towards the proletarian DUP and support that party's line on the Good Friday Agreement. If you read the resolutions passed at the various 'fields' across the north at the weekend you see that none of them support David Trimble's position.
The trouble with that is the effect it has on the judgment of UUP rebels like Messrs Donaldson, Smyth and Burnside all of whom addressed marchers, the majority of whom do not vote for the UUP. Their mistake is that, like Frazer Agnew, they will believe that just because everyone at their 'field' agrees with them, the Orange Order 'is ideally placed to bring about a new and vibrant unionism'. It's not. The order no longer has a grip on any levers of power. Its urban rank and file membership are lumpen proletariat. The Protestant middle class regard it as an embarrassing anachronism. Anyone who can is sipping Sangria in Spain rather than vodka and coke in Shaftesbury Square.
There's an odd symmetry between the leaders of the order in 1905 and the anti-agreement MPs pinning their hopes on the order today. The likes of the Earl of Erne used pro-union workers as foot soldiers to maintain their own vast estates and aristocratic privileges, trying to hang on to an era whose time had passed and was obliterated in 1914.
People like Frazer Agnew and the UUP rebels also hark back to a vanished era, deluding their listeners that they can recreate the past, that the Orange Order can represent anything but a shameful past of domination and discrimination. You'll notice not one of the speakers mentioned the future. It was all, 'Reject the agreement. Reject the Joint Declaration. Turn back the clock'. Ah yes, just like in 1905. Didn't work then either.
