Here’s Why Some People Wear Orange—Not Green—On St. Patrick’s Day

[Michie]

You might be used to people wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day, but some sport orange instead. Here’s why.

St. Patrick’s Day is filled with rich traditions, from eating corned beef to attending parades. If you venture outside to celebrate the holiday—perhaps to swing by a pub for a pint of Guinness—you’re bound to find yourself amid a sea of people wearing green. While most St. Patrick’s Day enthusiasts bust out their green clothing on March 17, there are some who would rather wear orange. The reason has everything to do with religion.

St. Patrick’s Day is a Roman Catholic feast day that began in 1631. It celebrates the patron saint of Ireland—even though St. Patrick wasn’t actually Irish. Irish Catholic tradition has strong associations with the color green, which is why you’ll often see people sporting it to celebrate the holiday. But not every Irish person is Catholic. Some are Protestant and wear orange to honor William of Orange, a Protestant who deposed King James II, a Roman Catholic, in 1688.

Continued below.

Why Do Some People Wear Orange—Not Green—On St. Patrick’s Day?

Learn the meaning behind wearing orange and the religious symbolism it holds.

www.mentalfloss.com

 

[RileyG]

I have ancestors who were both Irish Catholic and Irish Protestant.

I've been to Ireland once, a very beautiful country.

Praying for Ireland (and Northern Ireland) through the intercession of St. Patrick, they return to Holy Mother Church!

Thanks for posting!

 

[Wolseley]

No self-respecting Irish Catholic would wear orange for St. Patrick's Day, or any other day, for that matter.

Do some research into the history behind the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and you'll understand why. The Orange Lodge, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Apprentice Boys; the gerrymandering in elections to nullify the Catholic vote, even though the Catholics outnumbered the Protestants by a ratio of four to one; the Catholics in Derry being penned up in what was basically an enclosed slum that was half-ghetto, half-zoo; the Protestant government in Stormont ensuring that the best housing, the best jobs, and the best of everything, basically, was denied to Catholics; the Catholics in Belfast being crammed into dirty, overcrowded apartment buildings while vacant buildings deemed "Protestant" sat empty and unused.....the list is endless.

And then it reached the point where the Catholics finally refused to be treated like cattle any more. In August 1969, during one of the Protestant marches through Derry, when the Orange thugs engaged in their usual pastime of tormenting the Catholics in the Bogside ghetto, the Catholics boiled over, and started throwing rocks, bricks, and Molotov cocktails at their persecutors, and the result was the Battle of the Bogside, a three-day riot in which the Catholics more or less drove the Protestants completely out of the Bogside, establishing the now-famous area known as "Free Derry"---a place where not even the police or the British Army had any stomach to try and enter.

Skip forward two years to August 1971, and you had the Ballymurphy Massacre; in response to growing violence, the British Army entered Ulster, and in one of their sweeps to try to ferret out illicit weapons, they smashed in doors of Catholics in Belfast, terrified families, arrested people wholesale, looted houses and vandalized what they didn't loot, all the while leaving the Protestant houses completely alone, even though there were, at that point, more Protestant paramilitary intimidation/terrorist groups than there were Catholic ones. The British 1 Parachute Regiment ("1 Para") opened fire on crowds on three seperate occasions and gunned down ten Catholic civilians, not a single one of which had anything to do with criminal or political activities. One of these was Father Hugh Mullin, a Catholic priest who was rushing to aid another man who had been shot and was lying in the open; the priest was waving a white flag at the time. Another man died from a heart attack after a British soldier stuck an empty gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Five months after this, in January 1972, the Catholics in Derry staged a civil rights march, signaling that they wanted injustices and suppressions looked into and rectified. It was heavily stressed that the march was to be peaceful; the organizers wanted no violence. The marchers wanted to peacefully pass through the city to the city center, hold a rally, and disperse. They found their route blocked by British Army barricades, and most of them took an alternative route, intending to hold the rally at the Free Derry intersection. Some stones and rocks were thrown by some individuals on the fringes of the march, and the British soldiers responded with tear gas and rubber bullets; such exchanges were fairly common occurrences at the time. Somebody spotted some soldiers in the top floors of a three-story building and threw some rocks up at the windows; the soldiers opened fire with live ammunition and killed an unarmed 17-year old boy who was running away and fatally wounded a likewise unarmed 59-year old man who had nothing to do with the march....he was simply walking by on his way to visit a friend.

At this point, the British Army send in their troops (again, the infamous 1 Para) to "clear the area", and they went in like a herd of drunken elephants, blasting away; by the time it was over, 26 people had been shot, thirteen of those were dead, and another man died of his wounds later in the hospital. This incident became known as "Bloody Sunday", and as a result of the British Army's ham-handed activities, in the following months, hundreds of young Catholic men in Northern Ireland joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and the rest is awful history; what followed was thirty years of bombings, assassinations, abductions, murders, and sectarian strife.

All of which could have been completely avoided if the Protestant minority which held power in Ulster had simply treated Catholics with human decency and mutual respect, instead of animals to abused and derided. And that's why no self-respecting Catholic woild wear orange on St. Patrick's Day or any other day.

 

[Wolseley]

Battle of the Bogside - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Ballymurphy massacre - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Bloody Sunday (1972) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org