Melanie Nesbitt is unwrapping the remainder of her 30th-birthday cake in driving rain outside a historic Orange Hall in Co Armagh.
The Keady woman has not missed a July Twelfth parade in 29 years and is among the thousands lining the route in Lurgan early on Wednesday morning.
“We follow the Co Armagh parade wherever it goes each year, it’s just family tradition,” she says. “I have two brothers in a band and then all our neighbours as well.
“My daughter and my mum and friends are all here, it’s like a big meet up. I was born on July 9th, so I think I missed the first one, I was only three days old,” she says, laughing. “We’re having the last of my birthday cake from the weekend.”
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Perched on miniature Disney fold-up chairs beside her are two small girls wearing sparkly Union Jack hairbands and colouring in Barbie books with felt-tip markers.
“When are the bands going to be here?” asks five-year-old Shelley Anne Gillespie impatiently, as the heavens open and people run for shelter under enormous trees in nearby Lurgan Park.
The parade is billed by the Orange Order as the “largest Orange gathering in the world”. By 10.45am the crowds are four deep outside Brownlow House – a magnificent 19th-century building bought by the Orange Order in 1904, later becoming a base for second World War American troops, as the boom of Lambeg drums is heard in the distance.
Earlier in the morning the news had been dominated by reports of burning effigies of nationalist politicians and Irish flags at Eleventh Night bonfires. A sectarian display in Dungannon – in which an effigy of Sinn Féin First Minister designate Michelle O’Neill was set alight – is being treated as a hate crime by police.
Sisters Rebecca and Jenny McCoy express frustration about the “negativity” associated with the Twelfth. Growing up in Richhill, a village between Armagh and Portadown, they were “brought up with parades”.
“Burning posters and flags is not how we would celebrate the Twelfth,” says Rebecca. “Our dad is an Orangeman and when we were younger we would have held the strings of the banners in the parade. Dad is 70 years old now and still parading with a sore back. He went to Rossnowlagh last week, is parading today and will be in Scarva tomorrow.”
The siblings are in their early 30s and work as nurses in Belfast.
“We don’t get the sectarian side of things. In work, most of my friends are Catholic,” adds Jenny. “We would tell our friends that we are going to the parade and we would have a joke about it, with them bantering that I’m a wee ‘Orange Lil’.”
They contrast the Co Armagh parade – each year a different town is chosen to host it – with Belfast’s Twelfth event. Last week a leaked Orange Order report proposed shortening Belfast’s return route to curb drunkenness and “bad behaviour” after the 2022 demonstration was described as “probably the worst for decades”.
“Armagh is always a family occasion, it’s not like Belfast where it’s rough. It’s really not nice,” adds Jenny.
Broxburn Loyalists and the Portadown Defenders flute bands are among the 70 bands parading through the town along with 11 Orange Order district lodges to mark the victory of Protestant William III over Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
All the shops are closed, with most people sitting over rain-sodden bags filled with home-made sandwiches and snacks.
“You’re living the dream,” one parading Orange man shouts to a woman cowering under a rainbow-coloured umbrella.
“You can’t fill these kids,” another exasperated mother tells a friend as her son demands a burger at 11am.
For brothers Herbie and Sydney Anderson, there’s nowhere else they’d rather be.
The two Orangemen – between them they have more than 100 years’ membership in ‘the Orange’, a Protestant ‘fraternal’ organisation – have been marching since 7.30am and are accompanied by their young grandsons.
“It’s really a family day out here,” says Sydney, a former DUP MLA and ex-deputy mayor of Craigavon. “We’re commemorating our culture and history. We’re not out to offend anybody and we want everyone to come along and enjoy this.”
