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PARTISAN REVIEW
Royal Black Preceptory Day, a festival I did not understand. According to
the Oxford English Dictionary, a preceptory is a local community of
Knights Templar. Why they are Royal Black Preceptors, I can't imagine.
I recall from those marching days that the success of an occasion was
measured by the number of bands that joined the parade, and the dis tances
the celebrants had travelled by bus or train. Unionists included members
of the Orange Order and the Apprentice Boys; they wore black suits and
bowler hats, with orange sashes across their chests. The bands featured ban–
ner images of King William on his white horse casting King James to the
ground. Nationalists had no event to show as dramatic as that one, but their
banners in green, white, and orange presented a communal figure of Ireland
that supposedly included the mythical Kathleen ni Houlihan as vividly as
the historical Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, and Daniel O'Connell. The let–
tering on Nationalist banners was Celtic, a notional mark of allegiance to
Irish, a language we labored to learn. The music on those marching days
consisted of political songs and ballads that could be played to brass, pipe,
and drum. On the Unionist side I recall "The Sash My Father Wore," on
the Nationalist side "Who Fears to Speak of 'Ninety-Eight'?" and "A
Nation Once Again."
It
seemed a harmless custom, no real injury intend–
ed. There were grim faces, steadfast to some undefined purpose, but I did
not feel obliged to take them too seriously. The parades seemed picturesque
rather than sinister. The political passions on display in Warrenpoint were
not as fierce as in other towns and villages in the North-in Harryville,
Dunloy, and Drumcree, for instance, as in recent years.
I will put an end to these reminiscences now, because my memory has
been shown to be fallible. When I published a memoir called
VVarrenpoint
some years ago, I relied on my powers of recall to an extent I soon had cause
to regret. Errors of fact are there to embarrass me. So I will not claim that
my relation to the appurtenances of the marching days was analytic or oth–
erwise thoughtful. I did not wonder, for instance, as I have wondered
recently, when precisely Ireland had been a nation, such that in Thomas
Davis's poem of 1842 or thereabouts it must be made "a nation once again":
When boyhood's fire was in my blood
I read of ancient freemen
For Greece and Rome who bravely stood,
THREE HUNDRED MEN AND THREE MEN.
And then I prayed I yet might see
Our fetters rent in twain,
And Ireland, long a province, be
A NATION ONCE AGAIN.
