Orange Order

• 1. Introduction

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  The Orange Order was so woven into the state of Northern Ireland that in 1932 its first prime minister, James Craig, could declare: "ours is a Protestant government and I am an Orangeman." He was speaking for a fraternity of Protestant men, organised into lodges, that began as a sworn secret society in the Irish countryside. It now has lodges as far afield as West Africa and the United States. Yet at home it remains one of the most argued-over institutions in Ireland.

  Its supporters say it defends Protestant civil and religious liberties. Its critics call it sectarian, triumphalist and supremacist. Both claims have a long paper trail.

  This documentary follows the questions that trail raises. How did a society born from a fight at a country crossroads grow into the backbone of a government? Why did some of its own members break away? And why could a walk to one church in one town threaten a peace process?

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• 2. Crossroads and Rebellion

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  By 1786, drunken brawls between rival gangs in County Armagh had turned openly sectarian. Armagh was then Ireland's most populous county, and its Protestants and Catholics were roughly equal in number. The relaxing of the Penal Laws had raised tension through the 1780s, and families fought hard over small plots of land near the markets. The gangs reorganised as the Protestant Peep o' Day Boys and the Catholic Defenders. A decade of fierce conflict followed, and it spread into neighbouring counties.

  In September 1795, a crossroads near Loughgall called the Diamond became the setting for a showdown. The Defenders and the Peep o' Day Boys gathered to fight. The first stand-off ended without a battle, because the priest travelling with the Defenders persuaded them to seek a truce. The Peep o' Day Boys had just been joined by a group called the Bleary Boys from County Down. On the 21st of September, Defenders from County Tyrone arrived, described as "determined to fight". The Peep o' Day Boys quickly regrouped and opened fire. William Blacker wrote that the battle was short, and he put the Defender dead at "not less than thirty".

  After the fighting, the victors marched into Loughgall. In the house of James Sloan, they founded the Orange Order as a Protestant defence association built from lodges. Its central pledge was to defend "the King and his heirs so long as he or they support the Protestant Ascendancy". At first it was a secret society bound by oaths, with passwords and signs, a kind of parallel organisation to the Defenders.

  James Wilson, Daniel Winter and James Sloan are named as the three main founders. Wilson had earlier founded the Orange Boys. The first lodge was set up in nearby Dyan, with Sloan of Loughgall as its first grandmaster.

  On the 12th of July 1796, the first Orange marches took place in Portadown, Lurgan and Waringstown. They celebrated the Battle of the Boyne, one of the victories of William of Orange. This Dutch-born Protestant king defeated the Catholic English king James II in the war of 1689-1691. William gave the Order its name, and the all-island Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland followed in 1798.

  William Blacker was one of the very few landed gentry who joined at the outset, and he was unhappy with what came after the Diamond. He wrote that a determination was voiced to drive the entire Catholic population out of that quarter of the county. Notices warned Catholics to go "to Hell or Connaught". Within two months, 7,000 Catholics had been driven out of County Armagh.

  Lord Gosford, the governor of Armagh, protested: "It is no secret that a persecution is now raging in this country." A later Grand Master, also named William Blacker, questioned this. So did Robert Hugh Wallace, a former County Grand Master of Belfast. They argued that the "lawless banditti" could not have been Orangemen, since no lodges yet existed. Historian Jim Smyth called such denials implausible, while noting that all sides accept the movement's lower-class origins.

  In August 1796, the MP Thomas Knox wrote that the authorities had "rather a difficult card to play" with the Orangemen. The government hoped to thwart the United Irishmen by backing the Order from 1796 onward. That society had been formed in Belfast in 1791 by liberal Presbyterians and Anglicans, who wanted reform of the Irish Parliament, Catholic Emancipation and repeal of the Penal Laws. By the time the Orange Order appeared, they were revolutionaries seeking a republic that would "Unite Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter".

  Nationalist historians such as John Mitchel argued that the government stirred up sectarianism on purpose. Mitchel wrote that it spread fearful rumours of planned massacres of Protestants. There was an irony in the story. Between 1794 and 1796 the United Irishmen formed a coalition with the Defenders. They were indebted to the Armagh disturbances, because the Orangemen had scattered politicised Catholics across the country and boosted Defender recruitment.

  When the United Irishmen rose in 1798, most of their commanders in Ulster, and many of their rebels, were Protestant. Orangemen were recruited into the yeomanry and proved what officials called an invaluable addition. No attempt was made to disarm Orangemen outside the yeomanry. Officials feared that doing so would make "the whole of Ulster" as bad as Antrim and Down, where the rebellion was strongest.

  The massacres by rebels in County Wexford did much to dampen the rising in Ulster. At Scullabogue, over 100 non-combatants, mostly Protestant men, women and children, were locked in a barn that was then set alight. Trial evidence recorded anti-Orange sentiments among the rebels there. Partly because of this atrocity, the Order grew quickly, and gentry with yeomanry experience joined in large numbers.

  In mid-Ulster, the Defenders' homeland, they took no part in the rebellion. They were cowed and surrounded by Protestant neighbours whom the government had armed. The attacks on them were so severe that Grand Masters met to find ways of reducing them. According to Ruth Dudley Edwards and two former Grand Masters, Orangemen were among the first to give to funds repairing Catholic property damaged in the rebellion.

  The rebellion's great consequence was the 1800 Act of Union, which merged the Irish Parliament with Westminster. Many Catholics supported it. The Orange Order saw a threat to the "Protestant constitution", and 36 lodges in Armagh and Monaghan alone passed declarations against the Union. Within a generation, the law itself would turn against the Order.

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• 3. Bans and Revival

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  On the 25th of May 1816, armed Orangemen reportedly rushed into a church in Dumreilly parish, County Cavan, and fired on the congregation. The Boston Commercial Gazette printed the account on the 7th of October 1816, reporting the murder of a Catholic priest and several worshippers. The killings belonged to a wider feud between Orangemen and an Irish Catholic secret society, the Ribbonmen.

  The Unlawful Oaths Bill of the 19th of July 1823 banned oath-bound societies in Ireland. The Orange Order had to dissolve and reconstitute itself. A bill in 1825 against unlawful associations, aimed mostly at Daniel O'Connell and his Catholic Association, forced another dissolution.

  Catholic Emancipation arrived in 1829, and Catholics could sit as MPs and take up positions of power. Orangemen were alarmed. O'Connell's Repeal movement wanted a separate Parliament in Dublin with a Catholic majority, which would end the Protestant Ascendancy. From that moment the Order re-emerged in a new and more militant form.

  In 1835, a parliamentary enquiry declared the Order's oaths illegal and prohibited its demonstrations and parades. The following year brought a darker accusation. The Order was said to be plotting to place Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, on the throne in place of Victoria when William IV died. Cumberland was the Imperial Grand Master.

  Once the plot came to light, the House of Commons called on the King to disband the Order. Joseph Hume, William Molesworth and Lord John Russell pressed the matter. The King signalled that measures would be taken, and Cumberland was forced to dissolve the lodges.

  In 1845 the ban was lifted again. Then came the Battle of Dolly's Brae between Orangemen and Ribbonmen in 1849, which brought a ban on Orange marches that lasted for decades. William Johnston of Ballykilbeg, Sovereign Grand Master of the Royal Black Institution, led a campaign of disobedience against it. Since a Fenian-organised funeral in Dublin for Terence McManus in 1861, he had asked why loyal Orangemen should not march freely when nationalists could mobilise.

  On the Twelfth of 1867, Johnston forced the issue by leading a large procession from Bangor to Newtownards in County Down. Breaking the Party Procession Act earned him two months in prison. The following year he was returned to Parliament for Belfast as standard bearer of the United Protestant Working Men's Association of Ulster.

  By the late 19th century the Order was in decline. In the 1880s its fortunes revived when landlords embraced it against Charles Stuart Parnell's Irish Land League and against Home Rule. Colonel Edward Saunderson had represented Cavan as a Liberal and had ridiculed the Order's "big drums". In response to Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill in 1886, he put on an Orange sash. He believed the Order alone could cope with the anarchy and rebellion he saw in Ireland, and he went on to lead the Irish Unionist Alliance at Westminster.

  Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill was defeated in the Commons on the 8th of June 1886, and rioting in Belfast then took 32 lives. Revellers celebrating the defeat began attacking Catholic homes and businesses. RIC constables, many of them Catholic, were brought in from elsewhere in Ireland. Home Rule MPs accused Richard Rutledge Kane, a Church of Ireland rector and the Order's Belfast Grand Master, of fomenting the violence. Kane did not challenge a rumour that the constables were on a punitive mission for the Liberal government. He declared that unless they were disarmed, 200,000 armed Orangemen would relieve them of their weapons.

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• 4. Dissent Within

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  In 1895, the same Richard Rutledge Kane became a patron of the Belfast branch of the Gaelic League. In the following decade the League became firmly linked with Irish nationalism. Fellow patrons included Henry Henry, the Catholic Bishop of Down and Connor, and Thomas Welland, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore. George Raphael Buick, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, was the branch vice president.

  Historian Brian Kennaway remarks that there was a time when Orangemen, still regarding themselves as Irish patriots, "had no problem with the Irish language". Kane's memorial at the Clifton Street Orange Hall calls him a "Loyal Irish Patriot".

  In 1880, the Land League organised a withdrawal of labour from Captain Charles Boycott, a land agent in County Mayo. Orangemen from Cavan and Monaghan, under military and police protection, helped bring in the harvest on his employer's estate. Yet many Orangemen sympathised with reform. The League campaigned for the Three Fs: fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale. There were reports of Orangemen in Armagh, Cavan, Fermanagh and Tyrone joining the League itself. Gladstone's 1881 Land Act conceded the Three Fs, and the Irish Conservatives did not oppose it, seeing the land grievance as a danger to the union.

  From 1903, tenant farmers in north Antrim began defecting to a new Independent Orange Order. The quarrel had shifted from tenant right to compulsory purchase, the right of tenants to buy out landlords at fixed valuations. Within a year, the Independents had nine lodges in Ballymoney alone.

  The split had first appeared in Belfast. In 1870, laying the foundation stone of the Working Men's Institute, William Johnston welcomed Catholics and Protestants united around the flag of "The United Working Classes of Belfast". Others in the Order saw such unity as the same thing as religious and national ecumenism.

  The quarrel came to a head in 1902, in the contest to succeed Johnston as MP for Belfast South. At the time, four fifths of the city's lodge masters were workingmen. Thomas Sloan ran as the nominee of the Belfast Protestant Association against the official unionist candidate, one of the city's largest millowners. He was expelled, and he established the Independent lodges.

  For some of his supporters, the split was a protest against unionist leaders aligning with landlords and employers, whom they called the "fur coat brigade". During the great Belfast Lockout of 1907, Sloan spoke on platforms with James Larkin, leader of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union.

  In 1904, R. Lindsay Crawford, Grand Master of the Independents, set out a democratic manifesto in a book called Orangeism, its history and progress: a plea for first principles. His Magheramorne Manifesto that year urged Irish Protestants to "reconsider their position as Irish citizens and their attitude towards their Roman Catholic countrymen". That proved too much for Sloan and most of the membership, and Crawford was eventually expelled.

  The Independents' radical streak soon faded. In the 1950s and 1960s they concentrated on religious questions, especially keeping Sunday as a holy day and separating politics from religion. When the Troubles began, Ian Paisley started speaking at their meetings, although he never joined. The Independents became associated with him, his Free Presbyterian Church and the Democratic Unionist Party. Based mainly in north Antrim, they have lately held joint church services with the main Order, and some hope the old split will heal.

  Inside the main Order, the question of Irish identity never fully went away. In 1968, a lodge named Cross of Saint Patrick, LOL 688, was instituted to claim Saint Patrick, whom the Order argues was not Roman Catholic. Its chaplain, the MP Rev Robert Bradford, was later killed by the Provisional IRA. In the 1970s a Belfast lodge called Oidhreacht Eireann, meaning Ireland's Heritage, LOL 1303, argued that the Irish language and Gaelic culture were not the exclusive property of Catholics or republicans.

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• 5. Covenant to Power

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  In 1905, the Ulster Unionist Council was established, and the Orange Order was given 50 of its 200 seats. The Order kept that place in the constitution of the Ulster Unionist Party for a century. From its first days, it had helped form a distinct Ulster unionism.

  The Third Home Rule Bill was introduced in the Commons in 1912, although its passage was delayed until 1914. The Order helped organise the 1912 Ulster Covenant, a pledge to oppose Home Rule that up to 500,000 people signed. Some Orangemen had begun arming and training as militias in 1911. In 1913, the Ulster Unionist Council brought these groups under central control as the Ulster Volunteer Force. Orange lodges and UVF units overlapped strongly. In April 1914, a large shipment of rifles imported from Germany arrived in what became the Larne gun-running.

  The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 interrupted the crisis and suspended the Home Rule Bill. Many Orangemen served with the 36th (Ulster) Division and suffered heavy losses. Commemorating the Battle of the Somme in 1916 remains central to Orange life. Parades take place on and around the 1st of July, and memorial lodges and banners depict the battle. In the grounds of the Ulster Tower at Thiepval, a smaller monument honours the Orangemen who died.

  The Government of Ireland Act 1920 divided the island. The six northeastern counties of Ulster became Northern Ireland, and the other twenty-six became Southern Ireland. Intense cross-community violence flared in those years, mostly in Belfast. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 confirmed the new entity's place in the United Kingdom, and the Boundary Commission agreement of 1925 confirmed its borders.

  From 1921 to 1969, every prime minister of Northern Ireland was an Orangeman and member of the Ulster Unionist Party. All but three Cabinet ministers were Orangemen, and so were all but one of the unionist senators. Of the 95 MPs who did not become ministers, 87 were Orangemen.

  At its peak in 1965, the Order had around 70,000 members, roughly one in five adult Ulster Protestant males. Since then it has lost a third of its membership, especially in Belfast and Derry. An estimate in 2012 put the total at about 34,000. Its political influence suffered greatly after the unionist-controlled government of Northern Ireland was abolished in 1973.

  While that government lasted, the Order wielded real power. It was the force behind Ulster Unionist Party no-confidence votes in three reformist prime ministers: Terence O'Neill in 1969, James Chichester-Clark in 1969-71, and Brian Faulkner in 1972-74.

  After the Troubles broke out in 1969, the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland encouraged Orangemen to join the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Ulster Defence Regiment. Over 300 Orangemen were killed in the conflict, the vast majority of them in the security forces. Some Orangemen joined loyalist paramilitary groups. The Order urged members to stay away from such groups, and from the Democratic Unionist Party, the Independent Orange Order and the Free Presbyterian Church.

  Ian Paisley had been clashing with the Order since 1951, when it banned members of his Free Presbyterian Church from acting as Orange chaplains. From the 1970s it openly endorsed the Ulster Unionist Party against his Democratic Unionist Party. By the turn of the century, however, many Orangemen were voting DUP in large numbers because of their opposition to the Good Friday Agreement. The DUP won the most seats in an election for the first time in 2003.

  In 2005, the Order cut its tie to the Ulster Unionist Party, ending a link of 100 years. Grand Master Robert Saulters said that when the Council was established there was only one unionist party, and that "arrangements made in 1905 are no longer relevant". In December 2009, the Order held secret talks with both unionist parties, hoping to foster unity before the May 2010 general election. Sinn Fein's Alex Maskey said the talks exposed the Order as a "very political organisation". After the election, Saulters called for a single unionist party and warned: "we will continue to dilute the union if we fight and bicker among ourselves".

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• 6. Marches and Militants

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  The Twelfth of July is a public holiday in Northern Ireland and the highlight of the Orange year. Most lodges also hold a yearly parade from their Orange hall to a local church, and the church's denomination is often rotated according to local demographics. County Down has the most Twelfth venues, with thirty-three. Armagh and Fermanagh, with smaller populations, have twelve each. Villages such as Carrickmore, Cushendall, Rostrevor, Crossmaglen and Draperstown are not marched in at all. All but a handful of parades, at so-called interface areas where the two communities live side by side, pass peacefully.

  The Drumcree dispute is perhaps the best-known episode since 1921. On the Sunday before the Twelfth, Orangemen in Portadown traditionally marched to and from Drumcree Church. Most of the route was once farmland, but it now runs through a densely populated Catholic part of town. Residents have sought to reroute the march, seeing it as triumphalist and supremacist.

  Clashes had occurred intermittently since the 19th century, and the Troubles intensified the dispute in the 1970s and 1980s. After serious violence two years in a row, the march was banned from Obins Street in 1986. The focus then shifted to the return leg along Garvaghy Road.

  Each July from 1995 to 2000, Drumcree drew worldwide attention. It sparked protests and violence across Northern Ireland, prompted a massive police and army operation, and threatened to derail the peace process. Supporters of the Orangemen murdered at least six Catholic civilians. In 1995 and 1996, residents managed to stop the march, which led to a standoff between the security forces and thousands of loyalists. After a wave of loyalist violence, the march was allowed through.

  In 1997, security forces locked down the Catholic area and forced the march through, citing loyalist threats. That sparked widespread protests and violence by Irish nationalists. From 1998 the march was banned from Garvaghy Road, and large barricades sealed off the Catholic area. Things have been relatively calm since 2001, although the Order still campaigns to march there. The dispute also produced a short-lived boycott of businesses owned by Orangemen and their supporters.

  The Grand Lodge of Ireland does not recognise the Parades Commission, which it sees as set up to target Protestant parades. It points out that Protestants parade at ten times the rate of Catholics. Yet the Grand Lodge is divided, with 40% of delegates opposing official policy and 60% in favour. Most of the opponents come from areas facing restrictions, such as Portadown District, Bellaghy, Derry City and Lower Ormeau. In a 2011 survey of Orangemen, 58% said they should be able to march through nationalist and Catholic areas without restriction, while 20% favoured negotiating with residents first.

  Of the approximately 700 Orange halls in Ireland, 282 have been targeted by arsonists since the Troubles began in 1968. Sinn Fein's Paul Butler called the arson a campaign against properties belonging to the Order and other loyal institutions. Grand Secretary Drew Nelson says statistical analysis shows the campaign began in the last years of the 1980s and continues today. The Order claims considerable evidence of organised sectarian vandalism by republicans.

  On the 12th of July 1972, at least fifty masked and uniformed members of the Ulster Defence Association escorted an Orange march into the Catholic area of Portadown. That year Orangemen formed a paramilitary group, the Orange Volunteers. It bombed a pub in Belfast in 1973 but otherwise did little illegal beyond collecting the arms found in Belfast Orange halls.

  On the 6th of July 1986, Portadown Orangemen allowed known militants such as George Seawright to join a march, against a prior agreement. Seawright was a unionist politician and a UVF member. As the march entered the Catholic district, the RUC seized him, and the Orangemen attacked the officers with stones and other missiles.

  In July 1992, an Orange march passed the scene of the Sean Graham bookmakers' shooting, where the UDA had killed five Catholic civilians. Marchers shouted pro-UDA slogans and held up five fingers to taunt residents. Journalists Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack said the images of Orangemen gloating were beamed around the world and were a public relations disaster for the Order. Patrick Mayhew, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, said the marchers "would have disgraced a tribe of cannibals".

  The link to militants reached Britain too. In the early years of the Troubles, the Order's Grand Secretary in Scotland toured lodges seeking volunteers to "go to Ulster to fight". Thousands are believed to have volunteered, though only a small number travelled. In 1976, senior Scottish Orangemen tried to expel Roddy MacDonald after he admitted on television that he was a UDA leader. Three hundred Orangemen blocked his expulsion at a special disciplinary hearing.

  During the Drumcree standoffs, loyalist militants publicly backed the Orangemen and launched waves of violence across Northern Ireland. Loyalist Volunteer Force leader Billy Wright was often seen at Drumcree with Harold Gracey, head of Portadown Orange Lodge. Gracey later attended a rally for Wright and refused to condemn the loyalist violence.

  The Order has repeatedly condemned terrorism. In 2000, the Orangeman and Democratic Unionist politician Jeffrey Donaldson told a Twelfth demonstration that paramilitaries must not be allowed to hijack Orange parades. In 2008, Armagh Orangemen condemned the flying of paramilitary flags. In 2013, an Orangeman and DUP candidate jailed for a sectarian attack on a Polish family was expelled. Writer Eric Kaufmann argues that the Order took a firm stand against paramilitarism throughout the Troubles, rooted in the Protestant clergymen built into its power structure.

  The record is uneven, though. In the late 1990s, Stoneyford Orange Hall was reported as a focal point for the Orange Volunteers. After a police raid, two Orangemen were convicted for possessing documents likely to be of use to terrorists, an automatic rifle, and membership of the group. Their lodge refused to expel them.

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• 7. Beyond Ireland

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  The earliest Orange lodge in Africa was founded in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in the mid-19th century. Expansion into Nigeria followed in the late 19th century with the Lagos Fine Blues, LOL No. 801, and Africa's first women's lodge. By the 1920s, Nigerian lodges had passed entirely into African leadership under Grand Master E. A. Ojo.

  The Nigerian movement declined in the 1960s, but it seeded growth in Ghana and Togo, where national Grand Lodges remain active. In 1994, Emmanuel Aboki Essien of Togo became the first African President of the Imperial Orange Council. Ghana's Order was suppressed in the 1980s under the Rawlings regime and rebuilt in the 1990s with support from the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland.

  In Asia, Orangeism followed British military regiments and colonial administrators. Early in the 20th century, lodges such as LOL No. 899 in Sialkot, LOL No. 802 in Hong Kong and LOL No. 615 in Singapore served expatriate and military communities. The Sialkot lodge, now in Pakistan, was called "Rising Sons of India" and was made up mainly of soldiers from the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Rifles. None of these lodges survived decolonisation and the Second World War.

  In Oceania, the first Australian lodge was founded in Melbourne in 1843, following sectarian tensions during local elections. Sydney's first lodge was formally established in 1845 by members of British military regiments, notably the 17th, 50th and 63rd. Membership surged after the 1868 attempted assassination of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, in Sydney by the Fenian Henry James O'Farrell, as loyalist sentiment spiked.

  In New Zealand, the Order was first established in Auckland in 1842 at the Osprey Inn, and it grew influential during William Massey's premiership. New Zealand also adopted formal structures for women early, with the first women's Orange lodge opening in Wellington in September 1888.

  In North America, Ogle Robert Gowan led an Order that became a pillar of the Conservative Party in Canada. It was a fierce defender of British identity there, especially in Ontario and Newfoundland, from the mid-19th century into the mid-20th.

  The first Orange parade in America was held in Boston in 1824. The United States Order is best remembered for the 1870 Orange Riots in New York City. Irish Catholic groups tried to block Orangemen parading to celebrate the Boyne. The 1871 riot was bloodier still, with over 60 deaths, and it required the New York National Guard.

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• 8. Inside the Lodge

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  About 1400 private lodges form the base of the Orange Institution in Ireland, and every Orangeman belongs to one. Each sends six representatives to one of 126 district lodges. Each district lodge sends seven to thirteen representatives to one of 12 county lodges. These in turn send delegates to the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, which has 373 members. Much of the real power sits in its Central Committee, drawn from the counties of Northern Ireland and a handful of others.

  Despite this hierarchy, private lodges are largely autonomous. The Grand Lodge can suspend a lodge's warrant, which amounts to dissolving it, but this rarely happens. Several lodges have failed to expel members convicted of murder, despite a rule that anyone convicted of a serious crime should go. Portadown lodges have negotiated with the Parades Commission against Grand Lodge policy. A lodge wanting to change a rule submits a resolution to its district lodge, and it may travel upward to the Grand Lodge.

  Most jurisdictions require both the spouse and the parents of an applicant to be Protestant, though converts can appeal to the Grand Lodge. The Order bars non-creedal and non-Trinitarian Christians, including Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Unitarians and Quakers, along with Eastern Orthodoxy. Earlier rules named Roman Catholics and their close relatives. Current rules use the wording "non-reformed faith" instead.

  Between 1964 and 2002-11% of those expelled were removed for attending a Roman Catholic religious event such as a baptism, service or funeral. The rule rests on Reformed theology, which holds the Catholic Mass to be idolatry. Every lodge meeting opens with Bible reading and prayers that others "may become wise unto salvation", a direct quotation from 2 Timothy 3:15.

  The Order also takes the Fourth Commandment to forbid non-religious activity on Sundays. When the Twelfth falls on a Sunday, the parades are held the next day. In March 2002, the Order threatened to take "every action necessary, regardless of the consequences" to stop the Ballymena Show being held on a Sunday. The County Antrim Agricultural Association complied.

  James Wilson, James Sloan and 'Diamond' Dan Winter were Freemasons, and in the 19th century many Irish republicans saw the Order as a Masonic front for a more violent unionism. The lodge structure and a system of degrees survive. The degrees are interactive plays with references to the Bible, and the higher degrees, such as the Royal Arch Purple and the Royal Black Institution, raise particular concern about ritualism.

  The Royal Black Institution was formed out of the Orange Order two years after its founding. Members must belong to the Orange Order and be at least 17, and the institution is exclusively male. The Apprentice Boys of Derry commemorate the siege of Derry by James II. They have no formal connection with the Order, but the two societies share members.

  A distinct women's organisation, the Association of Loyal Orangewomen of Ireland, was revived in December 1911 after lying dormant since the late 1880s. It parades alongside the men except at all-male and all-female events, and the song "Ladies Orange Lodges O!" recognises women's contribution.

  In November 2007, the Order launched a competition for children to name a new 'superhero' mascot, part of a plan to attract younger members to an ageing organisation. The character took the name Diamond Dan, after Dan Winter and the Diamond at Loughgall. The British media nicknamed him 'Sash Gordon'. At the official naming in February 2008, education officer David Scott said he was meant to be someone who offers his seat on a crowded bus to an elderly lady, and who "will be keen on recycling". Uproar followed in the middle of the marching season, when it emerged that he was a repaint of illustrator Dan Bailey's "Super Guy" character, taken without permission.

  The office of Grand Master has passed through many hands, from William Blacker, listed as unofficial holder in 1795, to Edward Stevenson in 2011. The most recent name on the list is Harold Henning, in 2025.

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