WHEN the acclaimed novelist Eoin McNamee, who is director of the Oscar Wilde Centre at Trinity College in Dublin, was asked in an Irish Times interview last month what he thought about the re-emergence of the Drumcree dispute, he responded by offering a quote from another Irish writer.

McNamee, whose new collection of short stories, The Comets, has just been published, said: “I’m from Kilkeel... so I know exactly what an Orange march is. I’ll let Pat Boran’s Garvaghy Road sonnet speak for me.”

He highlighted the following section from the 1998 work by Dublin-based Boran about the death of the Quinn children in Ballymoney earlier the same year: “But if beliefs of mine had somehow led/To the murder of three innocent wee boys/In a fire whose flames were fanned by what I’d said/Would I be out there calling for my toys/my fancy clobber, my sash, my fife and drum?”

It caused me to reflect on perceptions of the Orange institution, including my own recollections of demonstrations in Kilkeel, as McNamee and I went to the same school, St Louis, in the town at around the same time, although he is three years younger than me.

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