Father Sean McManus: The Battle of the Boyne was the culmination of a squalid terrorist affair

I wish both sides had lost!

The Catholic Irish owed King James II no allegiance, and the Protestant Irish should not have been supporting treason against their King, whose daughter was married to King Billy, for goodness sake.

Not only that, but the Pope of that time (whom the Protestants hated) was supporting King Billy.

It was a squalid terrorist affair played out on the soil of poor Ireland, which lead to centuries of brutal anti-Catholic oppression, ethnic cleansing and genocide…

And to compound the injury, the British powers that be named this period the ‘Glorious Revolution’.

If people want to find appropriate language to say something about 1690, they should go back about one hundred years earlier to when Romeo and Juliet was written and borrow The Bard’s immortal words, “A plague on both your houses”— on both King James II and King Billy, scoundrels both.

Now, there’s an Englishman, whom both Protestants and Catholics can celebrate— Shakespeare.

Forget the other two terrorists, stick with a great Englishman.

Full disclosure: even though I am a native of Fermanagh – one of the Six Counties in Northern Ireland – and even though I know the history and culture well, I’ve never quite understood the mania for marching/parading in Northern Ireland.

And, above all, it is impossible to understand the Orange Order’s pathology of insisting to march in poor Catholic areas where they are not wanted.

How can rational people understand that without seeing it as a desire to assert Protestant dominance and supremacy?

One thing is sure: if Catholic nationalists and republicans insisted on marching through all-Protestant areas, the Irish National Caucus would be the very first to oppose it.

Father Sean McManus, President, Irish National Caucus, Washington DC