Editorial: Northern Ireland enjoys yet another successful Twelfth of July

Some of the very first readers of the News Letter in 1737 would have had a memory of the Battle of the Boyne.

A child of, say, 10 at the time of that momentous 1690 clash would have been in their 50s at the launch of this paper (now the world’s oldest English language daily).

Those two events are, in a loose way, linked. It all happened early in the enlightenment, that period in history when science, debate and the free flow of information was assessed against traditional religious thinking. The first surviving News Letters from 1738 even refer to atheism, albeit in an ad for a repudiation of such “irreligion”.

The battle in which King William prevailed had implications for world history, helping shape the ideals of the fledgling United States a century later. It was a defeat of the idea of absolute rule.

Many of these ideals are still the subject of political and even military wrangling. With threats posed by dictatorships in Russia, China and Iran, and fierce disputes about the nature of democracy even in countries as auspicious at the US, marking the Boyne victory is more relevant now than it might seem.

July 12 is a day of carnival and the simple joys of walking and watching in an (typically unreliable) early Ulster summer. GB News again captured the spirit of the day through live coverage that the BBC has abandoned. The latter’s news was again dominated by a tiny minority of deplorable behaviour at some bonfires, and a despicable racist intimidatory attack on nurses. The Twelfth, however is a happy, family day for hundreds of thousands of people. There are few things on these islands on the scale of the Belfast parade.

What a day it was! Congratulations to the organisers, participants and to GB News for capturing it where the national broadcaster failed – an event that means so much to so many people and is only held once a year yet to which the BBC nonetheless cannot do justice.