Culture : Marching for God and Country : * These are the ‘mad months’ in Ulster, when Protestants take to the streets to show their support for Britain and their disdain for anything Catholic.

“Oh give me a home, where there’s no Pope o’ Rome, where there’s nothin’ but Protestants stay. . . ,” sing the drunken youths, swaying arm in arm around the bonfire that belches smoke into the midnight Ulster air.

Atop the celebratory pyre, flames engulf an effigy of John Paul II and the loathed green, white and orange flag of the Irish Republic--the “foreign” land to the south. One reveler tosses his emptied can of lager into the blaze and, referring to a 19th-Century Irish revolutionary movement, shouts to the laughter of his mates: “Burn, ye papish Fenian bastard!”

Such is the state of Protestant Ulster this summer as it gathers around innumerable bonfires in hundreds of loyalist villages and working-class districts to celebrate a proud and bitter folk history forged by siege, suspicion and a pervasive self-righteousness.

July and August are what locals call the “mad months” in Northern Ireland. It’s no coincidence that the recent talks on the province’s political future ground to a halt just as loyal Ulster put on its marching shoes. As one political observer put it: “This is the time of year when loyalists and nationalists are most looking for a fight--not common ground.”

More than 100,000 members of Unionist fraternal organizations, led by the Orange Order, mobilize throughout the province under the dual banners of Protestantism and loyalty to the British Crown. Shutting down town centers and main roads, they parade through the streets to demonstrate their political and religious commitment--and, by implication, to oppose anew the aspirations of Northern Ireland’s Roman Catholic minority.

Orangemen are stubbornly slow to concede this point, preferring to view their July and August demonstrations as harmless “pageants.”

“Our parades are probably the largest expression of folk culture seen anywhere in Europe, if not the world,” boasts George Patton, executive officer of the Grand Orange Lodge, which has 80,000 to 100,000 active members among Northern Ireland’s 1 million Protestants.

This year the Orange Order and its senior branch, the Royal Black Institution, began their annual summer celebration on July 1, the 75th anniversary of the 36th Ulster Division’s decimation at the Somme in World War I. That slaughter of more than 2,000, most of them Orangemen, is still honored as a “blood sacrifice” that proved their devotion to Britain.

The Orange Order’s greatest source of historical inspiration, however, are the Protestant triumphs in the religious wars that swept Ireland in the late 17th Century.

The society takes its name from William III, prince of Orange, the Dutch royal who assumed the English throne in 1688 and defeated the Irish and French Catholic armies of James II at the Boyne River valley in July, 1690--thus, according to Protestant mythology, preventing “Rome rule” in Ireland. The image of “King Billy” on his white horse with sword drawn adorns brick walls in every loyalist district in Belfast, scores of Orange marching banners and more than a few tattooed torsos of loyalists themselves.

Similarly, Ulster folk memory relishes the eight-month siege of Londonderry, Ulster’s western port, which ended when Catholic armies were driven from the city’s walls in August, 1689, after an abortive effort to starve out the Protestant garrison inside. This event will be celebrated Aug. 12 by the most hard-line of the loyalist associations, the Apprentice Boys of Derry, whose members skirt the still-standing walls of the city overlooking the Catholic Bogside district below.

Each year these and other loyalists march under banners extolling the assumed wisdom of the Londonderry siege: “Not an inch!” and “No surrender!” These lessons remain potent today in the outlook of Protestant unionism, which holds that the very idea of accommodating or negotiating with the nationalists is dangerous.

Taken on one level, celebrations of the Somme, Boyne and Derry anniversaries can be lighthearted family days out--particularly the annual July 13 “sham fight” held on a country estate in Scarva, County Armagh. Blackmen dressed as Williamite (orange) and Jacobite (green) troops engage in self-conscious swordplay before the Catholic king’s green flag is shot to pieces before a crowd of about 10,000 picnickers.

The brass, bagpipe and accordion bands pass by booths of loyalist vendors selling everything from copies of newsletters attacking “the viper in vestments,” Irish Cardinal Cathal Daly, to T-shirts picturing a bellicose Bart Simpson asking “I’m proud to be a Prod--what the hell are you?”

Yes, they’re lighthearted days out--if you’re Protestant and Unionist. But more than 500,000 citizens of Northern Ireland are Catholic and nationalist.

As a result, the past two centuries of Protestant marches have served as a catalyst for loosing the tensions never far beneath the surface of Northern Irish society. It was, notably, the annual march of the Apprentice Boys in August, 1969, that triggered full-scale insurrection in the impoverished Catholic districts surrounding Derry’s city walls, bringing the British army onto the streets to restore civil order. The army has not left those streets since.

This year the marching season has served as the backdrop to sporadic late-night rioting. Heightened tensions encourage the hard men of front-line neighborhoods along the Catholic-Protestant divide to risk incursions into enemy territory. Using a derogatory epithet for Irish Catholics, Protestants look to “give a taig a kickin;” Catholics hope to spoil a “Prod” bonfire with a well-flown petrol bomb.

One working-class Protestant mother of five pointed to her unemployed sons as they hauled another load of broken and stolen furniture onto the 60-foot-high bonfire across the street in a rubble-strewn waste ground.

“The children’s been raised in such an atmosphere of hate. Now they just call them taigs and Fenians. This time of year’s the worst for it.” As she spoke, the woman sewed together a homemade Irish Tricolor to be burned in the bonfire that night.

The province’s police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, must deploy thousands of officers to protect the Orange parade routes and bonfires from hooliganism and harassment. In some areas the British army erects 40-foot-high canvas walls to block the view of Catholic estates overlooking Orange parades.

This massive security presence is still not enough to prevent conflict.

As one bonfire burned itself out in the loyalist Tiger’s Bay area of north Belfast earlier this month, the police came under simultaneous attack--from stone-throwing loyalist youths hoping to abuse residents of the Catholic New Lodge estate nearby, and from Irish Republican Army snipers concealed in the estate’s elevated apartments. Six policemen were wounded by the Protestant rioters.

In Portadown, a predominantly Protestant city 35 miles southwest of Belfast, police armed with submachine guns and clubs lined the Catholic end of Garvaghy Road as the Orangemen strode past with the area’s member of Parliament, the official Unionist David Trimble, in the lead. Those angry few Catholic residents who tried to enter the road or even leave their neighborhoods were pushed back or dealt chopping blows to the back as they ran.

“This is the one time every year when Portadown becomes a caldron of tension,” said a Jesuit priest who lives in the working-class Catholic area. “The Orangemen insist upon their marches, which are calculated to bring the Catholic community to a boil. They are shepherded through this exclusively Catholic area by hundreds of police. It serves as a real powerful symbol of their having the upper hand.”

At the top of the Garvaghy Road the Catholics’ off-white apartments give way to the Protestants’ brown brick; the IRA graffiti and Gaelic street signs stop, and the Union Jacks and Red Crossed-Ulster flags go up. The elaborate orange “gate” hung above the roadway--a common decoration put up by the local Orange Order lodges in most loyalist neighborhoods--clearly marks where rebel country ends and the Protestant Pale returns.

The residents on this end of the road have a vastly different version of events. They believe that the British government is punishing the Orangemen by not letting them march--as they used to--three times through Catholic estates.

“Our marches are a legitimate religious activity,” argued the Worshipful Master of one Orange lodge. “We march to our church along that road. It’s a traditional route,” said the Orangeman, who noted that his home has been attacked in the past by Catholics, and that a close friend of his was blown up in May by an IRA car bomb.

These same Orangemen maintain that Catholics should not be allowed to parade into their Protestant neighborhoods.

“They can just parade in their own,” says one worshipful brother. “This isn’t a double standard. Nae. The Roman Catholics make their own bed, so they have to lie in it. They don’t recognize the Northern Ireland state. They don’t want it or its institutions. If you don’t respect the state, nae, you’ve got to expect that this is the way you’ll be treated.”

When entertaining guests, loyalist families can be tremendously warm and generous. But politically they are quick to jump to the defensive when confronted, believing themselves to be misunderstood in a world populated by enemies and only half hearted friends.

“We’re the underdog here,” says Maxine, a Belfast factory worker who is dating a member of the Ulster Defense Regiment, the British army’s locally recruited and almost-exclusively Protestant unit that serves only in Northern Ireland. “Now you can’t even fly the Union Jack where I work anymore, because of all this fair employment. That’s not fair. You’re bowing to the Catholics’ pressure.”

Protestants who try to mix with those on the other side of the physical and cultural divide are often blacklisted by their Orange brethren.

Carol, a Protestant university staff officer, has lost friends because of her relationships with Catholics she met through her work. After bringing them into a loyalist bar, she was assaulted by neighbors and accused of being a “Lundy” (the name of the 17th-Century military commander at Londonderry who tried to surrender to James’ armies) and “left-footed” (an old country phrase, based on the belief that Catholic field workers pushed the shovel into the soil with their left foot, while Protestants used their right).

“I really underestimated the level of bigotry and fear in my friends,” says Carol, whose father is a staunch Orangeman and who asked that her family name not be used. “It really makes me sick. This is the price that someone trying to promote a little sanity pays for breaking ranks with their community. Their tribe, really.”

Orangemen are not interested in hearing Catholic arguments that the Northern Ireland state has been discriminatory against Catholics since its creation in 1920. They generally dismiss such views as the carefully argued points of a devious people bent at once on sponging off the British system and of undermining it when given the chance in hopes of achieving a united, Catholic Ireland.

Although the Orange Order claims to promote civil and religious liberty, it considers the Catholic movement in the late 1960s to achieve better housing, employment opportunities and electoral representation to have been republican and Communist-inspired. Any inequities, they argue, are in the past. They believe that Catholics today have won too many concessions, even though Catholic males in Northern Ireland remain more than twice as likely to be unemployed as their Protestant counterparts.

Protestant loyalists draw a range of distinctions between themselves and their Catholic neighbors. They perceive themselves as more industrious, moral and law-abiding.

A gap-toothed man watching the Orange parades march through downtown Belfast paused from his bottle of cola and whiskey. “Roman Catholicism is world domination,” the former British army squaddie shouted over the thumping of passing drummers. “Y’see the Pope? He’s sittin’ on a throne. And they’re big on them pagan images. Now I’m not stupid. I’m Protestant. I don’t have to go into the church and talk to somebody, or a statue, when I worship. I worship God.”

It would be a mistake to attribute the core of Orange passions to parochial bigotry, however. The continuing zeal to march, as the loyalist values are passed from father to son, also reflects the real vulnerability of Ulster unionism today.

The cliche that Protestants suffer from a “siege mentality” rings true, to the extent that their soldiers, police and political leaders remain targets in a struggle with the IRA.

Many Catholics are aware that Protestant hatred of them has escalated with each year of the IRA campaign, most of whose victims are local Protestants. The Portadown priest acknowledges this pressure. “The Protestant community has been pushed so far by the IRA,” he says, “it’s really amazing they haven’t gone out of control.”

On a recent trip to the south Fermanagh border village of Roslea, the official Unionist ward chairman there walked through the cemetery of the Anglican church opposite the Orange hall where he is “worshipful master.” His area is 90% Catholic or more; about half the adult Protestant males are Orangemen.

He pointed to one headstone. “This fella here, he was murdered just about a mile from our house.” The next, “A policeman. He’d just come off duty and was shot coming out his back door.” A third tablet in stone: “Another murder there by the IRA.” All were Orangemen and his friends, he said, but he is not bitter toward Catholics.

“I’ve been up to Belfast at Orange meetings and some of ‘em just get up and--och, there’s no sense a-tall in what they’re saying,” the Roslea Unionist said. “But they’re from 100% Protestant areas, and they only see things from their point of view. Their attitude would be, ‘The first Roman Catholic you see, shoot him.’ But that bigoted attitude gets you no road. The old saying goes, you can’t live in Rome and fight with the Pope,” he added with a wry smile.

This ward chairman noted: “I consider myself as Irish as a Catholic does”--a view not shared by most loyalists, who consider themselves British and who are suspicious of the label “Irish.”

But other Orangemen, incensed by Britain’s signing in 1985 of the Anglo-Irish Agreement--which gave the Irish government a consultative role in Northern Ireland affairs, snubbing Unionist opposition in the process--are coming to another startling conclusion about the way forward.

“We have learnt that the English Establishment cannot be trusted. They made a treacherous deal with Dublin behind our backs. We say we’re British, but the British don’t want us,” says the Rev. Hugh Ross, an Orangeman, Blackman and Apprentice Boy--and, as leader of the Ulster Independence Committee, seen as a loose cannon within the loyal ranks.

His group, which so far has only a small following of alienated Unionists, has called since 1987 for the six counties of Ulster to form an independent nation as the only way to gain decision-making power and thereby prevent Protestants’ eventual absorption into the Irish Republic.

While many of his Orange brethren wear badges depicting the British Crown on the open Bible and the motto “This we will maintain,” Ross wears a pin of the “Ulster National Flag,” featuring a six-pointed star with a red hand inside.

While men like Ross are still public rarities, as English policy-makers fail to defeat the IRA militarily and toy with the ideas of political reforms that might erode Unionist privileges further, Protestant restlessness and anger grows.

A young Orangeman who, like three generations before him, serves as master of both his Orange and Black chapters in his County Down village, is vehement about the embattled political state of his people.

“The British government has made it clear it could hand us over to Dublin unless we demonstrate loud and clear that we want to remain British,” he says. “That is why we march. We can’t have a united Ireland. Everything about our culture, our way of living, would be destroyed. The Irish government, internal terrorism, world media--we have everything against us! We have got our backs to the wall!”

Would he prefer to swap places with a Catholic resident of impoverished west Belfast? No, this Orangeman admits. He prefers his current lot. But if the worst comes and Britain pulls out, he warns: “We won’t submit to Rome rule. We can and will defend ourselves.”