ABSTRACT
While the Volunteers were celebrating the success of the French Revolution, in rural Armagh Protestant and Catholic peasant bands, known as Peep o’Day Boys and Defenders, had been fighting and raiding each other regularly since 1784. The legacy of the Volunteers, the Freemasons, the United Irishmen, the Defenders, and of popular involvement with political activity and debate, left a deep mark in Ulster. From the isolated Twelfth of July parades organised by the nascent Orange Order in the late 1790s, an extensive range of annual commemorations were established across Ulster which were used to define and to mark ideologically distinct and opposing identities. Commemorative displays of identity were still insistently marked, and, when parades were legalised after seventeen years, the established anniversaries were celebrated more energetically than ever. This in turn almost immediately provoked a descent into more intense riotous behaviour.
