Defenders of the Faith: Twelfth of July Rhetoric in the Later Brookeborough Era, 1954–1962.

The Twelfth of July is the unofficial ‘national day’ of Northern Irish Protestantism, and has often been characterised as highly sectarian and divisive. Research on the Twelfth has concentrated on the parades and on the Troubles period; assertions about the Twelfth and its rhetoric in the post-war, pre-Troubles era have often been based on little more than assumption. This article attempts to fill this gap by examining speeches made at Twelfth of July gatherings in Northern Ireland from 1954 to 1962. It will show that the dominant theme of the speeches was the threat to Ulster Protestants and their state from the Irish Republic, republicans such as the IRA and Sinn Féin, and from the Catholic Church. Orange and Unionist leaders used this sense of threat to discourage division and dissent within Ulster Protestantism. Although Irish nationalism and Catholicism were consistently presented as threatening, the amount of blatant sectarianism was much less than might be assumed. Northern Catholics were rarely attacked directly, and some Twelfth speakers argued specifically for better relations with Catholics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]