The Mail on Sunday (Irish edition) is not everybody’s idea of a truth-telling newspaper (that’s an understatement). They had a front-page ‘exclusive’ earlier this month entitled ‘Humphreys Husband’s Secret Orange Order Past’ about the Fine Gael presidential candidate Heather Humphreys’ husband Eric’s’s alleged membership of the order some 50 years ago.1 It claimed the candidate, who is a Presbyterian, tried to “evade” questions about when precisely her husband may have been in the order, and “admitted” that she had attended Orange parades in Monaghan as a child. This was the moment “the wheels came off” her media appearance in her home county, it added.
In a follow-up opinion piece in the Irish Times2, UCD historian Edward Burke, who has written a well-reviewed book about the unionists of Monaghan, Cavan and Donegal during the War of Independence and afterwards, told the story of Heather Humpheys’ grandfather, a Ulster Volunteer Force section leader, shooting an IRA volunteer in the face during a raid on his house in Aghabog, near Humphreys’ home village of Drum, in 1920. He went on: “But what can associations a century or a century and a half ago tell us about a presidential candidate in 2025? Firstly, if we are to live in a ‘shared island’ that respects ‘green’,’orange’ and many other traditions and cultures, these so-called ‘gotcha’ moments in a Border county over alleged membership of the Orange Order decades ago should be self-evidently inappropriate.”
He added in a LinkedIn message: “We can’t have a situation in Ireland where we talk about respect for traditions, a ‘shared island’ – and then launch a witch-hunt against a presidential candidate because her husband may have belonged to one of those traditions.”
A week later, Mark Hennessy, the Ireland and Britain editor of the Irish Times, put the row into a wider context.3 He quoted Monaghan historian Noel Carney, who was born in 1953: “In the past, it was difficult to find a Protestant who wasn’t a member of the Orange Order.” Hennessy reported that “there are concerns in Monaghan – to say that it is a fear would be overstating it – that Humphreys’ Presbyterian background will be used against her to stoke division.”
He also quoted Angela Graham, a highly regarded Clones community worker, and a friend of Humphreys, who believed that she would “follow in the footsteps of those amazing women, the two Marys there before, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese.” If elected, as a Monaghan Presbyterian who is is favour of a united Ireland – “but only through working with people and bringing them together” (her words at her Monaghan campaign launch) – she would be able to offer a hand of friendship across the Border in a way that no other president has been able to do. “She’s lived it. She understands. It’s in her DNA. That’s what’s so important”, Graham says. “No other candidate will bring that. She has that unique ability to cross community divides. She wouldn’t just be talking the talk.”
The Belfast-based grand secretary of the Orange Order, Rev Mervyn Gibson, seemed to agree when he told the Irish Times: “Personally, I think Michael D Higgins has been horrendous for community relations. I’m looking for a president who will build on what Mary McAleese did to grow relationships with Northern Ireland.” The best that can be said about Higgins was that he had little interest in and knowledge of the North. The worst is that by refusing to attend a harmless ecumenical service of ‘hope and reflection’ in Armagh in 2021 to ‘mark’ partition and the foundation of Northern Ireland, he showed himself to be an old-fashioned nationalist republican, and thus abdicated the role of peacemaker which his two predecessors had so bravely and successfully espoused.
I am no lover of the Orange Order. As an exclusively Protestant and anti-Catholic organisation, it has more than its fair share of bigots. I would like to agree with the Presbyterian leader, Rev John Rogers, who told a meeting in Kerry in 1850: “Presbyterian Ulster is not Orange. Presbyterianism is incompatible with, and destructive of, Orangeism. Orangeism is Toryism, and the genius of Presbyterianism is utterly antagonistic to such a despotic creed.” Unfortunately in the 175 years since then, much of Presbyterian Ulster has become just that: right-wing, fundamentalist, separatist and Orange.
However, like it or not, the Orange Order is an Irish organisation. It is supported by scores of thousands of Northern Protestants, and particularly working class and rural Protestants. In many unionist rural areas the Orange hall is the equivalent of the GAA club in nationalist Ireland: it brings together people for local, community, cultural and charitable events. United Ireland or no united Ireland, it is going to continue in existence for many years to come. Indeed, if the North is voted into a united Ireland by a narrow majority in a Border poll, and the political unionism of the present unionist parties becomes meaningless as a result, the order may see a renaissance as the main standard-bearer of Ulster unionist culture (such as it is), comprising the order itself, its associated bodies the Royal Black Preceptory and the Apprentice Boys of Derry, the 12th July and other Orange parades, the marching bands that go along with those parades, and the bonfires which precede them.
And it has its more open-minded and pro-Irish aspects. The late Rev Brian Kennaway, a senior Orangeman, doubled for a while as president of the longstanding cross-border peace and reconciliation group, the Irish Association. Several Orange banners on show at 12th July parades feature slogans in the Irish language (notably ‘Ireland’s Heritage’ Loyal Orange Lodge in Belfast). The writer Ruth Dudley Edwards, in her 1999 book on Orangeism, recalls that at the turn of the 20th century there was a Donegal Gaeltacht-born County Grand Master of Belfast who taught Irish classes on the Falls Road. Its current leader, Mervyn Gibson, who can be seen at Shared Ireland events in Dublin, is a courteous and intelligent man. There is still a Dublin and Wicklow Orange lodge, although for obvious reasons it keeps its head well down.
The historian Felix Larkin points out that representatives of the Orange Order from both sides of the Border were welcomed to Áras an Uachtaráin during Mary McAleese’s presidency and she visited the Orange Hall at Barkey in County Cavan in 2008. “That is what ‘bridge-building’ across the communities on this island is all about, ” he wrote.4
Most people in the South are deeply prejudiced against the Orange Order, and see it, because of its history of anti-Catholicism, as an evil organisation (a mirror image of many unionists’ and loyalists’ view of the GAA, who believe that it is an evil organisation because many of its supporters backed the Provisional IRA’s campaign of violence). A unionist acquaintance of mine, a decent man, recently recounted a conversation with friends in Galway who, when he told them he was an Orangeman, “looked at me as if I had been beamed down from Mars, as if I was some sort of alien.”
The Orange Order, unlike the IRA, never killed anybody in recent memory. And yet more and more people, particularly younger people, are coming to accept the IRA and Sinn Fein’s view, that such killing was necessary to bring about Irish unity. I would venture that some of the bitterest critics of the Orange Order are supporters of this view. Such hypocrisy is one of the less attractive characteristics of Irish attitudes.
We in the South need to get over our prejudices and do some more bridge-building to our Northern Protestant – and Orange – brethren, difficult though it may be. There was a lot of it going on in the 10-15 years after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the end of the ‘Troubles’, but it has gone backwards in recent years. There will be no genuine Irish unity without it.
1 The Irish Mail on Sunday, 14 September
2 ‘Humphreys family has nothing to explain or apologise for’, Irish Times, 16 September
3 ‘It was difficult to find a Protestant not in the Orange Order’, Irish Times, 20 September
4 Letters to the Editor, Irish Times, 17 September
2 Irelands together 
There is no need for anyone to demonise the OO. They are well capable of doing that all by themselves. Their raison d’etre is to be divisive and sectarian and anyone who seeks to build bridges to them is engaged in a fools errand. They want to burn bridges, not facilitate their building which for them can only be a one way street to a hated United Ireland. They can’t even build bridges to Britain.
You compare the OO to the GAA, and then pivot to saying that the OO never killed anyone, unlike the IRA. As if the IRA and GAA are are coterminous because some IRA volunteers may also have been GAA members. Well then, does the same logic not apply to the OO, many of whose members did kill people or engage in wholesale violent suppression or discrimination against Catholics and nationalists?
No one is calling for the suppression of the OO. Let them hold their parades and bonfires within the law. You seem to ignore the fact that many bonfires are illegal and deliberately incendiary of community relations, not to mention how environmentally destructive they are. The best we can hope for is that they will fade into irrelevance as a historic and cultural curiosity and tourist attraction. Their membership is now down to less than one score thousand and for the vast majority of protestants they are an embarrassment.
The OO.has nothing positive to contribute to Ireland or Britain either now or in some alternate constitutional universe and deserve no more promotion in the public space than some minor veterans association organising the occasional day out or social event for their members. If they want to find a more positive role in society I would be fully supportive, but while they celebrate division, sectarianism, discrimination and violent suppression they should be shunned, just as you shun the IRA, who at least have moved on from their sordid past.
And as for Heather Humphrey’s presidential campaign, I wish her the best of luck. She may not have distinguished herself in the many senior roles she had in government, but at least she did little harm. If only the same could be said for the OO.
Dear Andy I find nothing to disagree with in your piece. Your analysis is impeccable from my point of view.
My only concern is that it seems to assume that a ‘United’ Ireland [ie territorial unity] is imminent. It is certainly promoted as such by others, particularly by Sinn Fein, for their own deeply flawed political project; and some others go along with it for fear they may appear ‘anti-patriotic’. I dont of course include you in that category. Worryingly there are nationalist voices in NI even saying that reconciliation will have to wait until ‘after unity’; that to accept that it comes first, is to accept a ‘unionist veto’.
In my view, having lived through the 30 years of Provo and Loyalist butchery, and railed against it for all that time, it would not just be uncomfortable but deeply unsettling for society both north and south for 2 referendums to carry the day on territorial unity in the short to medium term. It could be equally unsettling if one [the Republic?] were to say no. So my advice to everyone is to tread softly.
What form that unsettling would take is anyone’s guess, but I am constantly aware that those of us who thought we had found a peaceful way to bring an end to discrimination in Northern Ireland by demanding ‘British Rights for British citizens’, came unstuck because we completely underestimated the forces we were unleashing. That is not an argument against the civil rights campaign, it’s an argument for caution in how we promote our legitimate desires for the future; in short we must avoid taking unnecessary risks with the lives and livelihoods of our children and grandchildren for a purely imagined benefit, particularly as there is a safe route forward that threatens nobody – the shared island approach.
I am not prepared to back demands for referendums in the short to medium term. I am quite willing to work for a shared island which for the foreseeable future leaves the constitutional framework, painfully arrived at, in place. In 25, 50 or 100 years time people will know whether or not it’s time to have, by agreement, a single jurisdiction on this island, but we will have got there without any bloodshed or hatred; and through peaceful progressive politics, hopefully, each corner of this island will be a good place to live.
Best wishes and keep up this essential work,
Proinsias
Proinsias De Rossa 0872544644
Like both yourself and Andy, I do not believe a border poll is either imminent of desirable in the immediate future. But who knows where we might be in 5 years time if (say) Reform get into power. My thesis has always been that a United Ireland will come about not so much because of demographic or political change in Ireland, but because a benighted England, in budgetary distress, will lose interest and seek to dump the problem onto all of us on this island.
The challenge for all of us is to be ready for that eventuality. I fear there will be no way forward that is not very unsettling for a large number, but I am also confident that the problems raised won’t be insurmountable by good, democratic, parliamentary politics, economic development, efficient administration, and the fearless imposition of law and order. Both parts of Ireland need to raise their game in that regard, both now and in more uncertain and constitutionally changing times.
Sometimes history can force your hand and present you with choices you would rather not have to face, or at least not yet. We may not have the luxury of serenely sailing on on our present course. I suggest all of Ireland could be in for a rude awakening.