As the song says, "after the ball is over, after the break of day" things look different. These days they are totting up the bill for that cultural exercise, the Twelfth.
This year it goes down in history as a quiet Twelfth, no major riots or attacks on the police or army down at the Drumcree Tomfoolery. There the Portadown brethren, as usual dressed like bank managers, were marching up to a head PSNI cop, going through the annual ritual of demanding their right 'from time immemorial' to trail their coats along the Garvaghy Road whose householders are fed up listening to blaring 'kick-the-Pope' bands and want a little peace. They did not get through the barbed wire entanglements or the expensive array of police and army detachments – not as big as on other riotous occasions over the years but costing the taxpayers a pretty penny nevertheless.
How much over the last few years?
Must be millions and millions.
All gone up in smoke when it could have been spent on hospitals, education, railways and all the run-down services starved of cash.
In Belfast the parade through the city used to be relieved by the quality and diversity of the bands – some playing popular tunes such as She Fell For The Leader of The Band – but now it has degenerated into a dull plodding affair of flutes and drums, a grim monotonous march backwards in time.
A relic of a sad and dreary past.
This year's march in Belfast was not without incident.
Councillor Jim Rodgers, the east Belfast former lord mayor and ever ready purveyor of soundbites on this and that, waxed indignant at the fact that the gates of the Belfast City Hall were locked, thus preventing Orange bosses Dawson Bailie and the Rev Martin Smyth marching through the grounds to lay wreaths on the Somme memorial.
The wreath layers instead entered by a side gate. Jim said this was extremely embarrassing for the Orange Order and an investigation must be held into what went wrong.
Where was the embarrassment for the Order? Could it have anything to do with the fact that Belfast's first citizen this year is the Catholic SDLP man, Martin Morgan?
Was it necessary for the indignant Mr Rodgers to add the snide comment that "the staff at the city hall are normally top rate and I don't want anyone to lose their job"?
(Oh Jim, will you ever shut up?)
Back again to that fable about Orangeism being a cultural exercise.
Looking back at its violent history, one wonders how the exponents of this latter-day attempt to reinvent Orangeism manage to be reconciled with the definition of culture.
Here it is: 'State of intellectual artistic and social development of a group?"
Intellectual? Artistic? Social? That's a laugh. There might be something in those colourful banners.
Artistic, yes but social? Oh no.
Historical perhaps – reminding us that Garvaghy Road is not something new.
What about the riotous history of Dolly's Brae, Johnston of Ballykilbeg and the Longstone Road, places where the intellectual and social members of the LOL insisted on their right to walk over downtrodden papists, come what may.
"Slither, slaughter holy water. Chase the papishes everyone!"
To add a personal footnote to this, I recall an afternoon years ago when my wife and I visited friends in Liverpool and engaged a friendly local taxicab owner to drive us to Lime Street Station. En route in general conversation he told us that his mother was killed in the Liverpool air raids.
He said he often wondered about his grandfather, an old man called Johnston from a place in Ireland called Ballykilbeg, whose picture with a long beard reposed over the mantle piece.
I told him Johnston was an Orange hero.
He laughed to hear this and confessed that some of his best customers were the Catholic priests of the local parish.
A decent likeable man and strange that his mother never told him about her dad.
