This summer I visited Northern Ireland for the first time in more than twenty years.
The last time I had been there was shortly after the Good Friday Agreement. I worked for a while with Mo Mowlam when she was MP for Redcar, and my memories of Northern Ireland were inevitably bound up with that extraordinary period when a conflict which had seemed permanent suddenly didn’t.
More than two decades later, many of the physical symbols were remarkably familiar. The Union flags were still flying from lampposts. The murals were still there. In parts of Belfast the kerbstones were still painted red, white and blue. There were memorials, Orange halls and peace walls, and gates which could still separate one community from another.
But something had changed.
Nationalist voices seemed to be everywhere. Talk to a taxi driver, take a tour, visit a museum or simply get into conversation in a pub and there was rarely any difficulty finding someone willing to explain the nationalist version of Northern Ireland’s history. People wanted to tell you about partition, discrimination, Bloody Sunday, internment and the British Army.
Loyalist and unionist voices were much harder to find.
That struck me as odd. After all, Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom. The flags and murals suggested a culture that was anything but shy. Yet the people behind those symbols seemed strangely absent from the story Northern Ireland now tells about itself.
So when I returned to Great Britain, I decided to seek some of them out. I was lucky enough to speak at length with two people from rather different parts of the unionist tradition.
Iain Carlisle is Chief Executive of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, a position he has held since 2016 after previously working in the agricultural and Ulster-Scots sectors.
Doug Beattie comes from a very different tradition. Raised in a Protestant working-class area of Portadown, he served for more than three decades in the British Army, including in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan, and was awarded the Military Cross. He became an MLA for Upper Bann in 2016 and later leader of the Ulster Unionist Party. He has since left the UUP and now sits in the Northern Ireland Assembly as an independent unionist.
They don’t represent the same strand of unionism and they don’t agree about everything. Which was rather the point. They came at the question from different directions, but between them they helped explain what had happened to the unionist community I remembered from more than twenty years ago.
Something We Have Lost
From Clacton to Horden, across Great Britain I had visited places where the institutions which once held the place together had withered. The working men’s clubs have mostly gone or are struggling. Churches have closed. Trade unions no longer provide the social infrastructure they once did. Political parties barely exist as membership organisations.
We talk endlessly about the economic consequences of deindustrialisation. We talk rather less about what happened when the institutions around which working-class life was organised disappeared with it.
Talking to Carlisle about the Orange Order, I had found something rather different. There are still hundreds of Orange halls scattered across Northern Ireland. And they aren’t simply places where men wearing orange sashes gather to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne.
They are community buildings. Carlisle talked about schools using them, adult education, IT classes, charities and community groups. During Covid, members delivered food and PPE and helped people who were isolated. He described Covid as having, in some ways, “re-communitised” the Orange Order.
Frankly, it was impressive.
There are plenty of things about the Orange Order with which I am uncomfortable. It is an explicitly Protestant organisation with a history inseparable from the religious divisions of Northern Ireland. Openly sectarian. But it would be ridiculous for me to spend years lamenting the destruction of civil society in working-class England, find a place where much of it has survived, and then refuse to acknowledge it.
The loyalist community has something that many comparable communities in Great Britain have lost.
A sense of place. A sense of belonging. And, crucially, the institutions through which that belonging can actually be expressed.
Doug Beattie saw much the same thing from outside the Orange Order. He talked about strong social networks, local pride, people supporting neighbours, volunteering, maintaining their communities and sustaining local businesses. Churches still play a role. So does the Orange Institution.
Where Have All the Loyalists Gone?
There was another part of Carlisle’s explanation which helped answer the question that had bothered me in Belfast. The loyalists hadn’t vanished. A lot of them had moved.
The geography of Protestant Northern Ireland has changed. Families who once lived in the traditional Protestant districts of Belfast have moved outwards — into suburbs, satellite towns and the smaller towns and villages beyond the city. Driving through towns like Bushmills this was very apparent.
Carlisle sees much of the strength and vitality of the Orange Order today in those places rather than Belfast itself. The Union flags and murals can remain after some of the people who originally put them there have left. The institutions move with the population. In a small town or village the Orange hall still matters. The lodge matters. People know one another. Families have connections stretching back generations.
But there was another movement too. Carlisle thought that one had weakened Protestant communities over previous decades.
His generation didn’t simply move out of Belfast. Many left Northern Ireland altogether.
“In my generation I would have been very much in the minority in staying at home,” he told me. Most went to university in places such as Edinburgh, Dundee, Glasgow and Liverpool, and many never returned. Carlisle described it bluntly as a “brain drain in the Protestant community”.
His own school year was extraordinary. About 90 left for university and only around ten studied in Northern Ireland. Some went to Oxbridge, Durham or St Andrews; others elsewhere in Great Britain. Carlisle thought the education system itself encouraged ambitious young Protestants to expand their horizons and get out. Many then found careers, partners and lives elsewhere.
There are signs that this may be changing. University fees make staying in Northern Ireland more attractive, while remote working has allowed some of those who left to come home without abandoning jobs elsewhere. Carlisle knows people who have done exactly that.
The unionist community did not simply retreat from Belfast into smaller towns and villages. For several decades it was exporting some of its most educated young people altogether.
650 Marching Bands
I grew up with brass bands in the North East, starting with the cornet and ending on the tuba as I outgrew each instrument. So I probably noticed the bands more than most visitors would.
There are more than 650 loyalist marching bands in Northern Ireland. That is an extraordinary number for a population of less than two million people. To someone arriving from England, they can initially look like another manifestation of the politics: uniforms, flags, flutes, drums and the annual marching season.
But that doesn’t really explain them. A band has to rehearse. People have to learn instruments. Somebody has to organise it. They travel to competitions and parades. They socialise together. And they are full of young people.
They perform many of the functions that football clubs, working men’s clubs, churches, trade unions and youth organisations once performed in communities across Britain. They create social capital.
Carlisle described what the bands give young people in simple terms: music, company, comradeship, travel, activity and fun. Identity is part of it, but not necessarily the whole of it.
Doug Beattie made a very similar point. Young people remain connected to unionist culture through bands, music and community organisations, but they are also more outward-looking than previous generations. They are increasingly comfortable with multiple influences and identities.
That matters because the young people joining those bands aren’t simply miniature versions of their grandparents. They grew up after the Good Friday Agreement. The Troubles are history to them.
For people of Carlisle’s generation, someone’s religion could tell you where they lived, which school they attended, which football team they supported and, sometimes, whether it was sensible to walk down a particular street. For the generation born after 1998, those distinctions matter much less.
Carlisle talked about his own children, now in their early twenties, going out anywhere they like in Belfast. When he was young, his parents worried about him going into the city because pub and hotel bombings were part of ordinary life. He thinks young people simply do not have the same binary attitude socially. They mix socially. Religious observance has declined. Catholics and Protestants meet one another at university, at work and in bars in ways that would once have been unusual.
Carlisle summed up the change rather neatly: someone can be at a band parade one night and in a bar the next in mixed Catholic and Protestant company. “I don’t think it’s as polarised as it once was.”
Yet hundreds of young people are still joining loyalist bands. The interesting thing, therefore, may not be that loyalist culture is disappearing. The culture is surviving more successfully than the sectarianism which created it. You can apparently enjoy marching through the streets behind a very large drum without devoting much thought to the constitutional significance of the Battle of the Boyne.
British, Irish and Both
Doug Beattie helped me understand another part of this. He does not describe himself as a loyalist. He is a unionist.
For him, unionism is not simply a political position. It is a sense of belonging: being part of something larger while retaining your own identity. And his identity is not simply British. He sees himself as both Irish and British.
There is no contradiction in that, he argues, any more than there is in somebody being Scottish and British or Welsh and British.
Iain Carlisle’s description was remarkably similar. He talked about what he called a multi-layered identity: geographically Irish because Northern Ireland is on the island of Ireland, politically British because it is part of the United Kingdom, and then Ulster Scots, Ulster British or any number of other identities within that.
From England, British identity in Northern Ireland can sometimes look faintly ridiculous: another Union flag, another mural, another lamppost painted red, white and blue. But talking to unionists made me realise that for many of them Britishness is considerably more substantive than that. It is family, history, institutions and citizenship.
For Beattie, it is also tied to service and sacrifice. Remembrance Sunday, Armistice Day and the first day of the Battle of the Somme matter deeply to him. So did standing in Westminster Abbey for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II and witnessing the coronation of King Charles III.
You don’t have to share all of that sentiment to recognise that it is real.
And if we accept that someone’s attachment to being Irish, Scottish or Welsh is meaningful, we can’t suddenly decide that British identity is absurd because a Protestant in Northern Ireland expresses it. In fact, the Northern Irish version of British identity sometimes felt in stark contrast to the Britishness or Englishness I found on the mainland — shallow, defined by tatty flags, with little sense of history beyond one World Cup and two World Wars.
But strong identities always contain a difficult question. Who is on the outside?
The Houses They Left Behind
When Protestant families moved out of Belfast, they left houses behind. Over time many of these houses were bought by landlords for the private rented sector, just like Horden. The connection between the owner of a house and the community in which that house stood weakened.
A landlord operates according to rather different incentives from a family which has lived in the same street for three generations. The landlord wants somebody who will pay the rent. That might be an ordinary private tenant. It might be someone receiving housing support. It can also mean accommodation ultimately funded through government contracts.
This matters when trying to understand something both Carlisle and Beattie talked about: the perception within parts of the Protestant working-class community that large numbers of asylum seekers and other newcomers were being placed in their areas.
Look at Northern Ireland as a whole and that perception is difficult to sustain. Northern Ireland accounts for just under 3 per cent of the UK population, but has less than 3% of the UKs asylum seekers. There is no evidence that Northern Ireland as a whole is bearing some wildly disproportionate burden.
But statistics covering nearly two million people aren’t necessarily how demographic change is experienced. A relatively small number of newcomers concentrated into a few streets can be highly visible, particularly where those streets already have high levels of private renting, transient populations and economic decline.
Doug’s formulation is probably the strongest version of this argument. He argues that the principal concern for many communities is not immigration itself, but unmanaged population change and the pressure that can place on housing, public services and community cohesion. He specifically points to concentrations of Houses in Multiple Occupation, often housing asylum seekers or other newcomers, within relatively small areas.
That is much closer to what I had already seen in Horden than to the simplistic idea of a community being “swamped”. Migrants didn’t drive Protestant families out of these neighbourhoods. The Protestant families had already left. The housing market changed. Landlords bought properties. Government housing policy and accommodation contracts created new incentives. And migrants became the people visible at the end of that process.
A perception can have a real origin without the explanation attached to it being correct.
The Darker Side of Community
This was where my admiration for the strength of loyalist civil society ran into a problem. Strong communities aren’t necessarily tolerant communities. Both Carlisle and Beattie were keen to distinguish between immigration itself and the way population change is managed.
Carlisle was explicit about it.
“I don’t care where people come from,” he told me. “If someone wants to come here, work, contribute and be part of society and the community, that’s a very different ball game.”
His concern was concentration and the speed of change. He talked about apartment blocks and social housing changing the character of small towns and about young local couples struggling to find housing. On asylum specifically he accepted the right of people fleeing war, famine or threats to their lives to seek refuge, but argued that simply dropping people into communities without a plan for integration was storing up trouble.
Doug made a similar case. He argued that unmanaged population change can place pressure on housing and services and can weaken community cohesion if people feel change is happening without planning or consultation.
There is a reasonable argument buried in there. Governments can create problems by concentrating vulnerable people in cheap accommodation in already fragile neighbourhoods and then pretending that putting a roof over someone’s head amounts to an integration policy.
But there is also a dangerous leap from complaining about how immigration is managed to deciding that the immigrant is the problem. The same things which produce solidarity — shared history, common institutions, family connections and a strong sense of place — can also make the boundary between people who belong and people who don’t much more visible.
The movement of Protestant communities away from Belfast into suburbs, small towns and villages may have strengthened that effect. They have become more geographically isolated at precisely the point that Northern Ireland itself has become more diverse. That doesn’t mean hostility towards outsiders is inevitable. But it does mean that we shouldn’t be terribly surprised when it occurs.
And when anti-immigrant sentiment has turned into violence, the distinction between concern about asylum policy and simple racism has disappeared remarkably quickly. People who had been living in Northern Ireland for years have been targeted. Romanian and Roma families have been intimidated, driven from their homes and firebombed. People who had absolutely nothing to do with asylum policy suddenly found themselves treated as though their presence in a street required somebody else’s permission.
Doug is explicit that violence in response to these pressures should never be justified or excused. Carlisle was equally unequivocal in condemning racist violence.
There is no complicated political explanation required for attacking a family because of its ethnicity. It is racism.
From Resentment to Petrol Bombs
There is, however, something which makes the consequences potentially more dangerous in Northern Ireland than in an equivalent community in Great Britain. Northern Ireland has the remains of an infrastructure of violence.
The Troubles ended. Not everything they created disappeared with them. There are still people and organisations accustomed to controlling territory, intimidating families and enforcing their authority through violence.
That doesn’t mean loyalist communities support them. Quite the opposite. It would be grossly unfair to suggest that someone playing a flute in an Orange parade has anything whatsoever to do with a criminal throwing a petrol bomb through somebody’s window.
But Northern Ireland still has networks through which prejudice can become organised intimidation remarkably quickly. The official figures show how persistent the legacy remains. In 2025/26 there were 21 casualties of paramilitary-style assaults. Sixteen were attributed to loyalists. That was actually the lowest total since the early 1980s, which tells you both how far Northern Ireland has come and how unusual the situation remains.
The distance from “these people shouldn’t live here” to somebody actually forcing them from their home is shorter when there are already people claiming the authority to decide who lives in a particular street.
The Defenders of the Community
There is an irony here which is difficult to miss. Loyalist paramilitaries historically claimed to be defending Protestant communities. Some people using the remnants of those organisations today are doing nothing of the sort.
They are preying on them.
Drug dealing, extortion and intimidation have become intertwined with the residual authority of paramilitary organisations.
Doug Beattie describes the continuing influence of loyalist paramilitaries in some working-class areas as a serious concern. He points directly to organised crime, drug dealing, illegal money lending and extortion, and to the way these networks thrive where there is deprivation, educational underachievement and a lack of opportunity. That is an important point. The criticism is not being imposed from outside loyalist Northern Ireland. It is being made from within unionism itself.
At some point the language becomes absurd. If you sell drugs to young people, intimidate families and threaten anyone who challenges you, you aren’t a defender of your community. You’re a violent thug and a drug dealer. The fact that someone once attached a political justification to the organisation whose initials you use doesn’t make you Che Guevara.
The Children of the Peace
Which brings us back to the young people in the marching bands. There is an enormous generational change taking place underneath all of this.
Iain Carlisle voted No in the Good Friday Agreement referendum. For his generation, the Agreement remains emotionally immediate. The prisoner releases, the compromises, the arguments about policing and decommissioning aren’t chapters in a history book.
They happened to them.
Doug Beattie’s experience is different again. He served through the conflict and subsequently entered politics. He has seen Northern Ireland from inside both the military and political institutions created by its history.
But the people now joining those bands have no memory of any of it. Someone born in 2005 is 21. They didn’t grow up checking underneath cars. They didn’t grow up with soldiers permanently on the streets. They don’t remember bombings appearing routinely on the evening news. And many don’t attach the same significance to whether the person standing next to them happens to be Catholic or Protestant.
More people have died from suicide in northern ireland since the Good Friday Agreement than died in the troubles. Between 1998 and 2024, 6,084 deaths by suicide were registered in Northern Ireland — roughly 70% more than the approximately 3,500–3,600 people killed during three decades of the Troubles.
Doug describes Northern Ireland simply: it is no longer the binary society it once was. People from different backgrounds increasingly mix through education, employment, sport and culture. He thinks the education system remains one of the great unfinished pieces of this transition. Children are still largely separated by sector and background, and he argues that the biggest opportunity lies in getting them to learn, play and form friendships together. That may ultimately matter more than another twenty years of arguments between unionist and nationalist politicians.
Because culture doesn’t necessarily disappear when the conflict that produced it ends. The bands can survive. The Orange halls can survive.People can remain proud of being British.
But none of those things requires the survival of the old sectarian boundaries.
Brexit complicated that identity in ways that nobody planning the referendum in Westminster seems to have thought terribly hard about. Northern Ireland voted Remain. I am too polite to tell you which out of Iain and Doug described Brexit as ‘bollocks”
Carlisle described Brexit to me fairly simply as “a bit of a disaster here”. Even within the Orange Order there had been committed Remainers, particularly in an agricultural economy whose supply chains routinely cross the border. For unionists, some of the consequences are almost comically mundane.
Carlisle had just taken delivery of a pallet of jigsaws from Leeds when we spoke. An hour after the invoice arrived, so did another bill for about £100 in customs-clearance costs — incurred moving goods from one part of the United Kingdom to another.
Doug calls Brexit a watershed moment for unionism. He was among those who warned that it could have serious consequences for Northern Ireland, and he believes the arrangements which followed have differentiated Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK and intensified the constitutional debate.
But Brexit also did something rather more subtle to identity. It gave people who had always thought of Irishness and Britishness as opposing identities an extremely practical reason to think again. An Irish passport after Brexit is also an EU passport.
That doesn’t turn a unionist into a nationalist. It simply demonstrates that identities can be more useful, more complicated and rather less ideological than politicians sometimes pretend.
For a younger generation in particular, British and Irish need not be mutually exclusive. Indeed, Beattie’s conception of unionism — confident enough to accommodate Irishness alongside Britishness — makes much more sense in that world than a unionism permanently defined by opposition to nationalism.
What Is a Community For?
I came away from these conversations more impressed by parts of loyalist culture than I expected to be. That may sound like a strange conclusion after writing about racist intimidation, petrol bombs and drug-dealing paramilitaries.
But that is precisely the point. The Orange halls are real. The marching bands are real. The voluntary work is real. The sense of community is real. The connections between people are real.
And in parts of Great Britain we have spent forty years allowing precisely those sorts of institutions to disappear and then wondered why people feel alienated from the places in which they live. There is something worth learning from loyalist Northern Ireland.
But there is also a warning. Because strong civil society isn’t, by itself, an answer to intolerance. Community can provide friendship, solidarity, identity and mutual support. It can also draw a line around itself.
The question is what happens when someone new crosses that line. That question is becoming unavoidable in Northern Ireland.
The younger generation cares less about the old sectarian distinctions. Immigration has brought people who have no connection whatsoever with the ancient argument between Protestant and Catholic. The geography of Belfast has changed.
Protestant communities themselves have moved.
The remarkable thing is how much loyalist culture has survived all of this. The challenge now is deciding what that culture is for. If Orange halls, bands, churches and voluntary organisations exist to strengthen their communities, then sooner or later the definition of community has to include the people who actually live there.
Catholic or Protestant.
British or Irish.
Romanian or Roma.
Someone whose family has lived there for three hundred years or somebody who arrived three months ago.
The future of loyalism may therefore have surprisingly little to do with whether young people continue joining marching bands. On the evidence I heard, they probably will. Just as the brass bands still march in Durham on Gala day.
The more interesting question is whether a culture which became exceptionally good at defending the boundaries of its community can adapt to a generation for whom those boundaries increasingly don’t matter.
And whether it can defend the people who now live inside them from those who still claim, rather unconvincingly, to be defending the community.
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