Moving the immovable

Abstract

This article examines Ulster loyalist discourse and its changeable nature, arguing that recent challenges to Orangeism from Irish nationalists and the loosening of the traditional alliance between Orangeism and the forces of law and order have necessitated the incorporation of a new narrative, which seeks to justify Orangeism on grounds that it is ‘traditional’ and must therefore be granted an unchallenged ‘right to march’ wherever and whenever it wishes. It has been found that this discursive shift is manifest not only at the senior levels of the loyalist community, for example, in the Orange Order’s leadership, but equally at ground level. It is also argued that the frame in which the argument is disseminated to the wider public – one of marching as a ‘civil right’ – has been borrowed from the ‘Catholic’ civil rights protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s.