sectarian passion, which has characterised Belfast throughout its history, is the struggle to maintain some standard of living in a city whose economy was (and, of course, remains) fundamentally susceptible to the unpredictable diktats of the government in Westminster.
What was known were the streets where one lived; at least they were predictable. Families stayed, generation after generation, and while the men in the house (and sometimes the daughters) might follow work ‘across the water’ (to Britain) or emigrate farther afield to Canada or Australia, the home territory was a proven ground. Here the rituals of Belfast life were handed down through the calendar of quasi-religious rites and political commemorations.
For the Protestant community, in the main identifying themselves with the union with Britain, their sense that their cultural and political aspirations were different to those of the Irish Catholic community was celebrated through Orange parades and marches. Taking place annually throughout the summer months of July and August, these parades in Belfast were dramatised statements of territorial imperatives and cultural bonding. If Cork or Limerick once had Corpus Christi, Belfast, which called itself unionist, had ‘The Twelfth’.
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