Orange Order

L'Ordre d'Orange était / est une association fraternelle secrète, protestante, anticatholique, antifrançais et ultra conservatrice. Le Pontiac en Outaouais fut la première région au Québec où l'Ordre s'est installé. Nous avons trouvé 15 des 17 vestiges des loges en Outaouais.

Portadown boy Billy Wright is considered to be close to Christ by many in The Province, while most people from The North consider him as the antichrist himself.

But who was he really? Who was the man with bible and gun who considered himself the armed arm of God?

How could someone without further education develop an ideology which was seed in so many people and brought so much interior love and exterior hate as a harvest?

His background, development and ideology have been examined in this research and are presented to the public for review.

Although a small cohort, often deemed insignificant, the Irish in South Australia developed an extensive network of social, business and political connections with the wider colonial society which aided them in their support of the long constitutional struggle for self-government taking place in Ireland during the four decades from 1870. Through the lens of the colonial press and an investigation of the support given to Irish nationalists this study shows the extent to which that small cohort extended its influence to the wider South Australian community to the benefit of the Home Rule movement. This was no mean feat considering the established view of scholars that the group faced the ‘unquestionable primacy of Anglo-Scottish colonisation’.1 Looking at the visits of the envoys of the Irish Parliamentary Party which took place between 1883 and 1912, this study, through a consideration of fundraising, the reputation of the Irish in the colony, the colonial press’ treatment of Irish issues and a lack of Orange opposition to Home Rule, investigates the impact and reach of this small Irish community during the years of Ireland’s foremost constitutional political movement. In its conclusion the research shows that underlying the long assumed quiet assimilation of this ethnic group into the general ‘Britishness’ of the colony, the Irish, from the outset, were aware of and consistently
1 Eric Richards. "Irish Life and Progress in Colonial South Australia " Irish Historical Studies 27, no. 107 (1991): 21
‘Yet we are told that Australians do not sympathise with Ireland’
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maintained a separate cultural identity and, during the period under consideration, this was augmented by an increased politicisation amongst the group – a world development which affected the Irish at both the macro and micro level. This thesis further reveals that in South Australia the Irish Home Rule movement garnered strong support in a colony where the majority of the inhabitants were neither Irish nor Catholic and this was due to a number of factors. Amongst these were factors which contrast sharply with characteristics of the Irish and the Home Rule movement in other Australian colonies, particularly the size, unity and nature of South Australian Irish nationalists, the lack of a structured opposition to Home Rule, the colony’s natural affinity with the notion of self-government and the fraternal bonds which came about through the issue of land ownership and control. While fundraising was the prime object of a series of visits to Australia by Irish MPs between 1883 and 1912, acceptance of the Irish claim for Home Rule amongst Australians in general proved equally important. Despite the small community of Irish people residing in South Australia during the most active years of the movement the colony subscribed generously to the cause. While the loyalty and support of the Irish-born and perhaps even the next generation might be expected more surprising is the widespread involvement of the non-Irish and non-Catholic citizens of the colony.

This study tests observations regarding the dynamics of fraternal organizations in urban and semi-urban Ontario communities against those in a rural settlement. The study focuses on Freemasonic and Orange Lodges that operated in Harriston, Ontario, a town of less than 2,000 persons between the late 1860s and the early 1900s. Exceptional results indicate fraternal organizations operating in rural Ontario during the late nineteenth-century may have had some unique characteristics with regard to their concerns for morality, politics, and involvement in community issues.

The Orange Order was central to Canadian nativism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Formed in 1795 by Protestants who feared the specter of Catholic influence and political involve- ment in Irish society, the Order protected British authority in Ireland. Its advocacy for British loyalism and Protestant hegemony made it attractive to the growing populace in Anglophone British North America following the American Revolution. The chronological focus of this article will be in the 1920s and 1930s, a period of nativist upsurge decades after the violent heyday of the Order documented in works like Scott See’s Riots in New Brunswick: Orange Nativism and Social Violence in the 1840s. It will explore the Orange Order’s legacy in New Brunswick, demonstrating its longevity as an anti-Catholic organization and its role in fostering the social acceptance of nativist ideology in the Northeastern borderlands long after the violent 1840s. It will present the Order as an ideological advocate for an ethno-religious strain of identity that espoused Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony across the Northeast and collaborated with establishment politicians and fellow nativist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to enforce this hegemonic worldview in New Brunswick.

In this paper I analyse how connected groups of Irish Protestants in two areas of colonial New South Wales established and maintained an unusually coherent range of ethnic and religious identities. The analysis concentrates on related groups from two regions in Fermanagh/Tyrone through their initial settlement in the Kiama region of New South Wales in the mid-nineteenth century and then onto secondary settlement areas in the Northern Rivers. The article then explores how Protestant churches provided the arenas for development of multi-layered narratives of social, ethnic and religious identities encompassing memories of Ireland, the migration processes themselves as well as settlement within colonial Australia.

In this paper, I discuss the recent merging of two Irish traditional performances, the house-visiting tradition of mumming and the competitive tradition of Lambeg drumming, in the Shared Education Program in Northern Ireland. While the traditional tunes and rhymes performed by the professional mummers, the Armagh Rhymers, tend to be associated with Irish Catholic culture, the Lambeg drum is typically associated with Protestantism and particularly with the private fraternal Orange Order. I use participant observation and draw on several performance studies articles to argue that the process of folklorization made it possible for the Armagh Rhymers to perform in the unprecedentedly political setting of an Orange Lodge. By establishing themselves as a professional and international performance group, rather than amateur local actors as mummers traditionally are, the group was invited by the county council to take part in its initiative of developing children's cross-community education with a focus on honoring Orange Order heritage. The emphasis on Orange heritage in this year's project encouraged the Portadown Orange Lodge to open their doors to the Armagh Rhymers and Lambeg drum educator, Billy Hill to engage children of local Catholic and Protestant schools in 6 weeks of ritual drama involving the Lambeg drum. I draw on studies that discuss narrative in ritual drama and mythic storytelling, as well as in soothing social tensions in a political context. I examine the formal similarities in the rhyming and drumming traditions, and consider the project's effectiveness in building friendly relations between the children, adults, and communities involved.

Who are the Royal Black Knights? Using primary documents including journals and reports as well as historical writings the book addresses this question. It includes 1925  listing of all 349 Royal Black Preceptories in Canada and Newfoundland and their Preceptors and Registrars.

This study investigates the organizational makeup of the Orange Order and whether it influences the use of ritualized behaviors that seek to enhance the visibility and power of this group in Northern Ireland. The investigation contributes to a growing body of literature dealing with the . . .

Who is the Grand Mistress? This book answers this question by providing the details of over fifty years of service beginning in the 1920s of one woman to the Ladies' Benevolent Association of Canada (L.O.B.A.)  This woman, Melda Grace (Boutilier) Sutherland grew up and lived most of her life in Nova Scotia.

The 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) led to a major realignment in Unionist politics in Northern Ireland. The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), hitherto the dominant force within the Protestant-British tradition, was usurped in electoral popularity by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). In its post-GFA rise, the DUP garnered majority support from members of the Orange Order, the largest organisation in Protestant civil society. Drawing upon the first membership survey of the Orange Order, this article examines the demographic and attitudinal bases of support for Unionist political parties amongst its members, and tests whether the locus of support for the DUP is evenly distributed, or instead biased towards particular age groups, social classes or Protestant denominations within the Order, as well as assessing whether attitudinal variations may be influential in determining party loyalties.

This paper looks at Stephen Olbrys Gencarella’s idea of Critical Folklore Studies and its compatibility with cultural sustainability. Gencarella calls for folklorists to tackle hegemonic forms of folklore in an effort to help subaltern groups. In doing so, it could happen that a folklorist contributes to the destruction of a form of folklore. This paper will look at Protestant traditions in Northern Ireland which are highly contentious and which could be described as hegemonic. By doing so, the paper will attempt to create answer, and create discussion about, the question of whether folklorists should always strive for cultural sustainability.

'Loyal and True' were words included in the inscription on the headstone of an Orangeman who died in 1894 in Nova Scotia. What did this mean? By the early 1900s there were over 100 Orange Lodges in Nova Scotia from Cape Breton Island in the east to Yarmouth in the west. This book explores the beginnings and history of Spurgeon Loyal Orange Lodge No. 1624 of Torbrook Mines, Annapolis County. It was organized in 1892 and declared dormant in 1923. The headstone inscription was for one of its' departed members. The book also includes as an Appendix A listing of Orange Lodges which once were active throughout the Province and their locations..  Available on Amazon in paperback, hard cover, and kindle format.

Throughout  the province of Nova Scotia and across Canada there are headstones marking graves of members of the Orange Lodge with inscriptions and symbols but none as unique as two in Annapolis County. Nova Scotia.  They are found in historic Old Tremont Cemetery, which also holds the grave of a father of a Canadian Prime Minister.

On a hill overlooking a portion of the Cemetery are the two headstones to Orangemen, standing side by side as sentinels.  They were both erected by members of the local Orange Lodge,  Spurgeon Loyal Orange Lodge # 1624.  It was a lodge established in 1892 when iron ore was discovered in the area and mining operations began that led to the growth of the population.  Many of the original members were miners.

" Why do people behave the way they do? " Up to now, ritual has been seriously underutilized for studying human behavior, i.e., ritual. The structural ritualization theory attempts to narrow this gap in our understanding of the social causes and consequences of our actions by focusing on the ritualized behaviors that define much of our daily lives. Taking a broad approach to science in sociology this perspective is grounded in a commitment to three goals: the development of theory, the substantiation of these concepts through empirical evidence, and the application of this knowledge to resolve social problems and dehumanizing conditions in contemporary society and to enrich our personal lives. This book is the first to comprehensively describe the structural ritualistic theory, which since its inception a decade ago, has developed in several directions involving different lines of cumulative research. This book shows how structural reproduction has occurred throughout the world, how rituals can be strategically used and power can influence rituals, and how the disruption of ritualized practices and the reconstitution of ritual subsequent to such events are of crucial importance for human beings. Weaving its way through the book Knottnerus discusses why ritual provides a missing link in sociology and helps us better explain the extreme complexity of human action and social reality.

As people try to learn about the past they will sometimes inquire about old regalia which they are unfamiliar with like a sash of a Royal Black Knight. Recently I was contacted by a museum in New Brunswick and provided with photos of a very old sash that it had been asked to give information
about.

In September 1795, fighting broke out between members of two men’s groups in a field near the Diamond crossroads in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. One group was the Catholic Defenders, and the other, an offshoot of the Protestant Peep o’ Day Boys. Historians link this Battle of the Diamond to sectarian tensions over competition in the linen industry and to County Armagh’s border position between Ireland’s Protestant-majority north and Catholic-majority south. The Orange Order links this battle to its own foundation. The story goes that after their involvement in the battle, several Protestant men retired to one of their nearby homes and founded the Order in honor of England’s King William III (Prince of Orange in his home, the Dutch Republic). The Order’s official website lists its founding site as the inn kept by James Sloan in Loughall. Yet two thatched cottages stand near the Diamond, each with a caretaker who says it is the real Dan Winter’s cottage, and the Orange Order was founded there. Several County Armagh Orangemen I interviewed also named Dan Winter’s cottage as the site. As an anthropologist, I am not as interested in which site is correct as I am in the important role that these two Dan Winter cottages currently play in local Orange Order lore. Using Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire to analyze my ethnographic data from fieldwork among Orangemen in County Armagh, I speculate on the interplay between history, memory, and narrative in the making of Dan Winter’s space(s).

The Orange Order is a Protestant fraternal order within Northern Ireland that has branches across the former British Empire. Since its formation in 1795, it has been described as a brotherhood, definitively male with a triumphalist parade culture maintaining Protestant `civil and religious ...

This study investigates the organizational makeup of the Orange Order and whether it influences the use of ritualized behaviors that seek to enhance the visibility and power of this group in Northern Ireland. The investigation contributes to a growing body of literature dealing with the Orange Order in Northern Ireland and, more broadly, the analysis of ritual and power. Using observational data, interviews, and historical documents we argue that the semi-decentralized organizational structure of the group is of crucial importance for determining how successfully it can engage in ritualized practices, especially parading. Employing structural ritualization theory and the concept of strategic ritualization we examine three ways the Orange Order uses rituals, i.e., as ritual legitimators, sponsors, and enforcers, and their relationship to the organizational makeup of this group. The third type, ritual enforcers, is defined here for the first time. We suggest that the present study contributes to our understanding of the social dynamics operating in the Orange Order as well as the linkages that may exist between organizations and social ritual. Additional issues warranting further research are also discussed.

This paper focuses on the Orange Heritage initiative and its two interpretive centres in Northern Ireland. Developed over three years and funded with £3.6 million of EU money, the centres – one in east Belfast, the other in Loughgall (Co. Armagh) – were opened in the summer of 2015. The stated intent is to pursue “the work of educating and encouraging a mutual understanding and respect for the culture and traditions of the Orange Institution.” This is envisaged as part of promoting reconciliation in a deeply divided society. The sites also memorialize the Orange Order's 332 members – a good proportion of whom served in the security services - killed during the Troubles. Given this and the Order's association with Protestant history, the institutions of power and contentious parades, the Orange Heritage initiative has a challenging and complex mandate. It is also indicative of the increasing institutionalization of a fractured heritage in Northern Ireland ...

The Orange Order is a Protestant fraternal order within Northern Ireland that has branches across the former British Empire. Since its formation in 1795, it has been described as a brotherhood, definitively male with a triumphalist parade culture maintaining Protestant `civil and religious ...

This paper focuses on heritage development in relation to victims of the Troubles in Northern Ireland (1968–1998). While some were killed by security forces, such as on Bloody Sunday in Londonderry/Derry (1972), paramilitaries accounted for approximately 90% of those killed, with republican groups alone taking 60% of lives. However, most public, as well as judicial, attention has been on the minority that were state victims. This is certainly important, not only for victims’ families and their communities, but also for calling the state to account. However a question remains as to justice for victims more broadly, especially as part of a negotiated settlement among all the major players.

To date no universal mechanism or procedure has been agreed to deal with the overarching victims’ legacy in Northern Ireland. However, heritage development – as asserted by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission – can contribute to transitional justice by providing symbolic reparation for past wrongs through museums and memorialization. In short, a transition in the present requires a transition of the remembered past.

With the support of public funding, the trend in Northern Ireland is now towards a fractured heritage that expresses the contested past through different narratives, often for different audiences, at different locales. This includes the segmented commemoration of victims. Such fragmented commemoration reflects the saliency of violent division, both social and political, into the present day. But it also poses a challenge regarding the use of heritage as symbolic reparation contributing to reconciliation and transitional justice, especially on behalf of victims across the board.

Discussion about remembering victims and heritage in Northern Ireland will draw on two specific initiatives. One is the redevelopment of the former Maze Prison/Long Kesh. Eight miles southwest of Belfast, it is one of the primary sites associated with the violence of the Troubles. In 2003 proposals were tabled, by an organization representing republican (mainly IRA) ex-prisoners, to develop a museum there. While most of the prison buildings have since been demolished, a representative sample was retained. Years of controversy ensued over their potential re-use for heritage development alongside a new EU-funded peace centre. While for some time it seemed that the project may go ahead, it stalled - perhaps permanently - in 2013. A core reason given for withdrawal of the necessary cross-party consensus regarding redevelopment was an ”insensitive attitude towards IRA victims.”

The other is the Orange Heritage initiative and its two interpretive centres, one in east Belfast and the other in Loughgall (Co. Armagh), opened in 2015. The stated intent is “educating and encouraging a mutual understanding and respect for the culture and traditions of the Orange Institution.” This includes active outreach and educational programmes. Importantly the sites also memorialize the Orange Order’s 332 members – a good proportion of whom served in the security services - killed during the Troubles. Given this and the Order’s association with Protestant history, institutions of state power and contentious parades, the initiative has both a challenging and complex mandate.