Orangemen in somberos - a Twelfth to remember

Living a bit out of the way I wasn’t serenaded by an Orange band, nor did I even hear one in the distance. Yet we’ll all remember this year when the big parades didn’t happen.

We’ve come a long way since the war-like seventies when defiance was the name of the game. The idea of no big Orange celebration in towns and cities then was unthinkable.

In the midst of those warring years the drums just got louder and the bonfires higher as followers of Orange culture defied all and sundry to keep their big traditional event. No surrender it was then. Surrender was in the air on Monday past but there was fun, good humour and an audience quite happy with a scaled down event with bandsmen in sombreros playing drums and flutes.

Maybe lockdown has been a good thing after all and has taught us patience we never thought we had. We’re going to need to hold on to that patience as I suspect it will be needed as the year rolls on amidst awful warnings that the virus could very well return to bite us.

It was in this vein that the Chancellor Rishi Sunak was pictured this week, for once tight lipped, as though staring down the barrel of a massive gun containing explosive debt, trying to summon up the courage to tell us ‘austerity and financial repression’ are round the corner.

The debt that has been built up through dealing with the pandemic has to be faced by us all. The billions borrowed has played havoc with the Government’s ‘own fiscal sustainability’ and it’s anyone’s guess how it’s all to be repaid. How will we be affected? Higher taxes haven’t been ruled out.

If the pandemic breaks out again later this year we could all be cancelling Christmas, hopefully, like the Orange men, in good spirits.

Compromise is a word politicians like to use a lot. The people this week showed how compromise can be used for the good of everyone. Few of us understand how massive debts run up by a Government are paid off. It usually takes a long time for the debt to catch up with us ordinary mortals, but catch up it will. So maybe now is not the time to go mad in the shops, change the car, re-decorate the living room you’ve been stuck in during the lockdown or book a holiday.

Of course, the country has been here before. I’m old enough to know what it was like in the early fifties a decade after the Second World War was over and the UK government had a massive debt to pay back to the Americans whilst they tried to re-build the country. Anyone with even a tiny garden grew vegetables and hawkers came around the doors selling fruit, potatoes and even second hand shoes. None of us has any idea how the UK Government will fight back but it is known that after the Second World War was over they plunged into a massive re-building programme which provided jobs. The Health Service was established though on nothing like the scale it is today but it took a long time for this kind of progress to filter through to places like Northern Ireland.

The summer jobs that might have been available for people in the massive fruit, vegetable and flower farms in England are usually done today by European labour which is cheaper. Such employment kept many Northern Ireland families from starving after the end of the Second World War. Now that the UK has succeeded with Brexit it is likely that many of the those European workers will not be allowed into the country providing opportunities for young people here to find summer jobs currently denied to them, money that could help with university costs.

Difficult times are ahead but this week has shown that people are prepared to compromise and this will have been a Twelfth to remember.