What do you do when you have a product that has gone out of fashion, is deeply unpleasant or has been discovered to have harmful side effects? Lard sellers must despair every time some smarty pants doctor tells a patient that it clogs up the arteries and will kill you quick even if it does make nicer chips. Only some dark art could persuade a drinker with any sense of taste that Fosters lager is more palatable than tepid three day old urine. This is where advertising and rebranding come into their own.
The Orange Order has a fairly serious image problem. Somehow the message that its core principles are tolerance and piety don’t seem to have been widely grasped outside its membership. This may not be unconnected with the fact that many of the brethren, as they refer to themselves, are under the impression that the Catholic Church is not even Christian, this despite the fairly large prominence Christ is given by the Romanists. Rather helpfully Brian Kennaway, author of the book The Orange Order A Tradition Betrayed explained on the BBC that the Order itself has never expressed this view. On the other hand neither has it been contradicted. You can’t help thinking that if the Order’s leadership were to find that many of its members were heading off to a gay sauna to unwind after a hard day’s marching that they might express an opinion.
From the title and much of what he had to say on the radio Brian Kennaway yearns for the golden age when the 12th of July was not tainted by bands celebrating the achievements of the loyalist murder gangs and was free from any hint of sectarian aggression. That only really existed when the Fenians in the north of Ireland were so cowed that they dared not raise a whisper of complaint, so at the very latest you could say that this golden age ended in 1967.
On the same programme David Hume, speaking for the Order, regretted that these bands were taking part and that preventing them from marching with the Orange parades was a slow process. In the event that a group of Dutch, bi-sexual alcoholics turned up with garish outfits and dreadful music (check the video if you don’t believe me) to celebrate King Billy as one of their own we can speculate that there would be no slow process getting rid of them.
David Hume explained with no obvious irony that the Orange Order is now working with the tourist authorities to develop the Orange marches as Belfast’s answer to the Notting Hill Carnival or Mardi Gras. This implies that Belfast City Council’s key tourist demographic is now hard drinking, tone deaf European and north American white supremacists. Is this really a group worth courting? The extra policing costs, court time and clogged casualty wards would probably offset what little economic benefit they brought.
Gladys Ganiel makes her living at the Irish School of Ecumenics, whatever that is. She’s an academic teaching “Reconciliation in Northern Ireland” who inflicts a trip to Belfast on the 12th of July on her students. This is surely the action of someone with unresolved aggression issues against her own teachers. When asked to comment on the viability of Orangefest as a tourist moneyspinner she displayed superb comic understatement saying of her students’ reaction to Orangefest that “it’s not something they would do as a holiday. Some find it scary and the drums are intimidating”. These are major negatives for any aspirant tourist flagship event.
Billy Mawhinny, the event’s development officer has his work cut out. ‘The festival means come and see us, come and see that we are not the quasi-fanatical Protestant organisation that hates everyone outside us.’ Apparently last year some Poles and Romanians turned up but that’s probably rather less likely next week since they have just been given a vivid demonstration of the very mindset that Billy describes so well.
Has the Ku Klux Klan thought about launching “White Fest”?
Liam redux 
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