Brian Kennaway and the Orange Order
It's been released to co-incide with the start of the 2006 'marching season' here in Nothern Ireland. Nice timing. by Brian Kennaway, Presbyterian minister and former chair of the Order's Education Committee, lambasts the Order, in no uncertain terms: an institution that has lost its moral direction, abandoned responsibility in a divided society, forsaken its original Christian ethos, and embraced political opportunism. The book is being serialised this week in the and Brian Kennaway is my guest on next week's Sunday Sequence programme , when we'll convene a panel to examine his claims. He's also making a visit to tonight's Hearts and Minds programme. And I'm off tonight to the book's launch at Union Theological College in Belfast. If you were Brian Kennaway, who would you invite to make a speech at the launch of a book lambasting the Orange Order? The former Unionist leader David Trimble, of course. (Wasn't he the Orange sash-wearing politician who famously 'danced' along the road, hand-in-hand, with Ian Paisley at the in 1995 to the rapturous applause of Orangemen after they won their stand-off with the nationalist community of the Garvaghy Road?)
If you were David Trimble, would you accept the invitation? I'll tell you later what the soon-to-be Lord Trimble has to say at tonight's book launch.
Comments
Trimble's changed his (Orange) tune. He got elected after that dance with Pailsey - leader of the Unionist Party. So he walks into leadership on the back of the Orange Order, and now he's celebrating an attack on the order? Could it be because the order broke its links with the UUP during his tenure as leader?