Truly 'Loyal'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 36, 3 September 1903, Page 18

Truly 'Loyal'

For some twelve or eighteen months past Belfast Orangeism has been split into two uproarious factions. Each of them has, during that time, pretty regularly sanctified the Lord's Day by pounding the brainpots of the other faction with the bricks, clubs, ship-bolts, pav-ing-stones, and road-metal that are usually devoted to cracking the skulls of ' Papishes.' Those noisy * loyalists ' have, in fact, turned a quarter of Belfast into a mild pandemonium and have set law and order at sheer defiance. On the 'glorious twelfth,' however, they joined forces against the common enemy. Our Irish files to hand give fearful accounts of the celebration of the great Orange saturnalia. Drunkenness, stone-throw-ing, murderous assaults on the police and upon inoffensive citizens, revolver-firing, housebreaking, looting, .and the other customary scenes of organised riot, ruffianism and violence constituted the ' divarshuns ' of the yellow ' loyalists ' out for a holiday. It would be well if the brethren in New Zealand arranged to send a few missionaries to teaoh the elements of Christianity and civilisation to the unredeemed savages who wear the Orange sash and welt the Orange drum in Belfast, Armagh, and Portadown.