The "orange lodges" were (and still are, though their appeal
has waned) Protestant fraternal organizations that formed in
Deasy's beloved Ulster to
celebrate the memory of William
of Orange, to violently intimidate Catholics, and to
ensure the continuation of British Protestant rule in Ireland.
It is highly misleading, at best, to say that they "agitated
for repeal of the union."
The lodges formed in the early 1790s, and soon joined to make
up a united Orange Order, Lodge, Institution, or Society that
survives to the present day and still organizes supremacist
marches through Catholic areas in the north. While it is true
that the Order opposed Union when the idea was first being
proposed in the 1790s, the
Act of Union was not passed until 1800. Orangemen
quickly came to support it, and never "agitated for repeal."
In the 1870s and 80s, when the
Home Rule movement gathered momentum, the Order was
inflexibly opposed. Its support for Union with Great Britain
has continued throughout the history of Northern Ireland, from
1922 to the present.
The closest American analogy to the early Orangemen is the Ku
Klux Klan. Orange forces randomly attacked and murdered
Catholics, destroyed cottages, invaded churches, and mounted
public displays of might. There are significant differences:
the Americans were reversing the effects of a war that the
South had lost, while the Ulster Protestants were preserving
the fruits of a war that King William had won; and American
blacks could not offer any organized resistance like that
mounted by the Irish Catholics called Defenders. Still, Orange
opposition to Irish Catholic autonomy has always been
unambiguous and coercive. Deasy's picture of Orangemen as
making common cause with nationalists like O'Connell could not be more
inaccurate.
