Feel the burn

So last night was Eleventh Night, when massive, fuck-you-climate-change bonfires are lit all over Northern Ireland. This is supposedly to celebrate King Billy’s victory over King Charles in 1690 (i.e. the beginning of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, when Irish people lost most of their rights). It’s an opportunity for drunk young men to throw beer bottles around, play loud music and generally terrorise the neighbourhoods where they build their two- and three-storey bonfires. Many of the bonfires are draped with Irish tricolour flags and with the election posters of candidates from nationalist parties (nationalists seek unification with the south). So the bonfires serve several purposes:

1. Intimidate the other side.
2. Recruit children to join paramilitaries.
3. Assert territorial control.

The fires would be a thing of the past, as they should be, but for the power that Protestant paramilitaries still enjoy. Their rallying cry to politicians is: "This is our culture. You can’t take our heritage away from us.” When really it’s just ugly intimidation and empty triumphalism. Echoes of the confederate flag debate.

So today all the Protestant Boys march. The Defenders of the Lagan. The Sons of the Conqueror. The East Belfast Brigade. More than 60 pipe and drum bans and almost as many Loyal Orange Lodges, from Protestant neighbourhoods all over Northern Ireland and a few from Scotland. I volunteered at a stand selling tea and coffee near my church. The money raised will provide books to the low income communities in Protestant areas. The poorest neighbourhoods in Northern Ireland are Protestant, a reversal from the 1970s when Catholics would have had that distinction. On a very simplistic level, the bonfires and parades are a way of preserving an identity ("this is something I can be proud of”) in a society where being white and Protestant is no longer the ticket to a good job and income that it once was. Poorly educated Protestants have lost privileges vis a vis Catholics (and Chinese and Koreans and other countries that gained under globalisation), so their bands and bonfires are a way to assert an identity that has been threatened by their loss of total control of the province and to remind Catholics of who won back in 1690.

The parade in East Belfast passes a Catholic community. To avoid sectarian conflict, this police vehicle instructs the bands to play hymns, not military songs that are particularly offensive to Catholics.

The rest of the photos are of some of the (many many) pipe and drum bands.

While these marches have a similar triumphalism to the bonfires, I don’t find them as upsetting. Partly because they don’t cause the same environmental damage as burning rubber and pallets by the hundreds of thousands. Partly because the music is very good. And partly because I think about the krewes of New Orleans and the mummers of Philly. Men just like to dress up and parade. No two ways about it.
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