FACEBOOK was invented in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates in a student hall in Harvard.

Twitter was invented in March 2006. Ten years later TikTok came on the scene.

They all made a big difference to Drumcree in 2026.

The murder and mayhem Orangemen and their unionist and loyalist terrorist supporters provoked from 1995-7 may have figured largely on TV here, and to a lesser extent in Britain, but it hardly captured the attention of a wider world.

Noel Doran: How the Orange Order turned Drumcree into a strategic catastrophe

Brian Feeney: How unionism lost the battle over Drumcree on social media

Social media has changed all that. Over the recent fortnight-long stand-off, the Orange Order and political unionism decisively lost the battle on TikTok, X and Facebook.

The elderly Orangemen came across as unsympathetic and ludicrous in their outfits.

The poet Philip Larkin described Orangemen in 1951 as follows: “Cut a fringed orange anti-macassar in two and hang one round the neck of each man: give him large false orange cuffs and white gloves to emphasise the tawdry ugliness of his blue Sunday suit, and clap a bowler hat on his head – then you have a lodger ready for marching.”

What a contrast with the spontaneous music and light-hearted atmosphere of the crowd on Garvaghy Road displayed on TikTok and Facebook.

Unionist........

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