To their members and supporters (not to mention sympathisers) the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland is a purely “cultural organisation” that “peacefully celebrates” British and Protestant ethnicity and identity in Ireland. To pretty much everyone else on the planet they are a militant Christian fundamentalist organisation that wraps up anti-Catholic sectarianism and anti-Irish racism with the more extreme strands of British Nationalism.

What it ”celebrates” is British colonial history in Ireland and a British colonial view of Ireland. It represents those who see themselves as a superior colonial community on the island of Ireland. It represents a group of people who are the Western European equivalent of the Apartheid-era Afrikaans community of South Africa. And who act in precisely the same manner.

You want proof?

Well here it is, July 12th, 2012.

On Donegall Street in Belfast a British Unionist paramilitary band, the Shankill YCV, stop their parade and spend several minutes marching in circles outside a Roman Catholic church carrying British flags and playing the “Famine Song”, an anti-Irish tune mocking the Great Famine of the 1840s in which over a million Irish men, women and children died.

They are recorded by a local Irish citizen who when spotted by the marchers, including Orange Order members, is set upon and attacked.

This is the real Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland. Not of 1812 or 1912 but of 2012 – of the 21st century.

The settler flags are raised in the British Colony in Ireland

Related articles

• Ardoyne Residents Respond To Orange Order Intimidation (ansionnachfionn.com)
• Burning The Village To Save The Villlage (ansionnachfionn.com)
• Clashes during Orange march (morningstaronline.co.uk)
• Shock as Orange Order leader seeks permission for Dublin parade (irishcentral.com)