The Emergence of Political Parading, 1660–1800

Abstract

The origins of political parading in modern Ireland are to be found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first noteworthy political parade was held in 1660, but though key dates on the commemorative calendar of Irish Protestants, which provided the occasion as well as the raison d’être for parading, were inaugurated shortly afterwards, parading did not become an established part of the Irish historical landscape until the eighteenth century. Like the commemorations of which they were a feature, parades helped to sustain the Protestant interest by providing it with communal opportunities both to recall its distinctive historical experience and to affirm its attachment, in the form of a shared monarchy, to the British connection. They thus contributed to the maintenance of the distinctively ‘Protestant’ and ‘British’ aspects of the Irish Protestant interest’s identity at a time when commercial and constitutional grievances might have encouraged it to move in another direction.