In 2019, journalist John Walsh watched on as Orangemen marched through Portrush, Co Antrim, for the annual twelfth parades, which commemorate the Battle of the Boyne in Northern Ireland. While Walsh had regularly been to the North, it was the first time he’d actually watched one of the Orange walks that are synonymous with unionist communities. “I couldn’t believe it, I mean it’s extremely colourful and it’s quite a spectacle, but also here was a culture that’s almost mutually contradictory to anything that people in the South think of when they think of what being Irish means,” Walsh tells The…

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