Orangefest to be gay but not camp

If two of Northern Ireland’s newspapers are to be believed the Orange Order is sending out contradictory signals about Monday’s parades. The Belfast Telegraph reports that crowds in the city centre will enjoy street entertainment as part of the ‘Orangefest’ celebrations. Iris Robinson will be shocked to learn, however, that one of these acts is to be a ‘Gaiety Engine’ who will be presented by ‘Strangelings’. This revelation seems to sit uneasily with Fionnuala O’Connor’s claim, in her Irish News column, that the Order’s Drew Nelson plans to clamp down on ‘camp followers’.

Comments

andrewg said…
Please tell me "Orange Dan" is a joke...
8 July 2009 at 11:28
Anonymous said…
Sam Gardiner MLA, the Ulster Unionist Assembly Member for Upper Bann, who is a Past District Master of Lurgan District Orange Lodge and is currently Senior Imperial Deputy Grand Master of the Black Institution, has said:

“I know that there is an increasing emphasis on turning the Twelfth into a festival which everyone can enjoy and there is no harm in that. It is important to remember it is a celebration. It is also important to remember, however, what it celebrates.”

“The Twelfth is a celebration of civil and religious freedom and of the British constitution which has given our freedom under the law, and our rights as citizens. The whole fabric of our society - our political rights, our financial system, our individual freedom – all developed out of the constitutional settlement of 1688-1690 which it celebrates. We owe the creators of the Revolution settlement a lot. This country would have been a very different place without the stand they took against arbitrary power.”

“People should also remember that the Twelfth is about civil and religious liberty, and about the freedom of people to express their beliefs and views. It is not about domination or suppression of other people’s views. We should be proud that in this part of the United Kingdom we celebrate such a worthwhile set of ideas and principles.”

“So let it be an Orangefest by all means but let us also remember the serious messages it conveys about personal liberty and freedom. These freedoms and liberties are so much under threat these days from an over-powerful government machine and control freakery that we would do well to remember that the core message of the Twelfth is about freedom, liberty, human rights and human dignity.”
9 July 2009 at 15:40
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more