The Boyne Obelisk

When it comes to triumphal statements you can’t find a stronger symbol than the Boyne Obelisk. Oldbridge in County Meath in Ireland is the site where the Williamite forces crossed the Boyne River from the north and drove away King James who ran off to Dublin leaving his Irish allies in the shit. The Battle of the Boyne was not the end of the war, nor was it the most important battle. That was probably Aughrim. But the Battle at Oldbridge was when the two competing rulers, William of Orange and James the Shit were on the battlefield at the same time.

The Boyne became and remains an enormous symbol for Ulster protestants and the Orange order in particular. The Orangemen after all took their colours from William. The Williamite War in Ireland formed part of the larger conflict between Catholic France and the Protestant Grand Alliance known as the Nine Years War.

Protestantism in Ireland became established by the victory at the Boyne. What followed was an era of oppression of and discrimination against Catholics using the Penal Laws, probably the most discriminating set of laws ever passed. When the Southern Whites were ushering in the Jim Crow era in the USA they studied the Irish Penal Laws. The Battle of the Boyne was fought in 1690 and the Penal laws were introduced from 1695 with the Education Act to 1728 with the Disenfranchising Act.

In April 1736 the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lionel Sackville, laid the foundation stone for an obelisk at Oldbridge. At 53 metres it was when constructed the tallest man made object in Ireland and the tallest obelisk in Europe. There was no subtlety about the message here, this granite monument was intended to be a nail in the coffin of Catholicism and Irish Nationalism. The main inscription read as follows:

Sacred to the glorious memory of King William the Third, who, on the 1st of July, 1690, passed the river near this place to attack James the Second, at the head of the Popish army, advantageously posted on the south side of it, and did, on that day, by a single battle, secure to us and to our posterity, our liberty, laws, and religion. In consequence of this action James the Second left this Kingdom and fled to France. This memorial of our deliverance was erected in the 9th year of King George the Second; The first stone being laid by Lionel Sackville, Duke of Dorset, Lord Lieutenant of the Kingdom of Ireland, MDCCXXXVI

Almost 100 years later when King George IV visited Ireland in 1821 he made a detour to visit the site in what could almost be interpreted as a pilgrimage.

At the height of the Home Rule Crisis in Ireland in 1913 a flying column of Ulster Unionists travelled down to Meath in the heart of the Marching Season in July and planted a Union flag on the Obelisk. They left a placard which read; Rebel hands may tear down this flag but they will never tame the Lion Hearts of Ulster!

The Boyne Obelisk today carries a different symbology. In 1923 after the war of Independence, and after the Irish Civil War, a group of soldiers from the newly established national army detonated explosives at the base of the obelisk and took it down. The weight of English colonialist oppression was lifted from the land. You can visit the site and climb the base to observe the remains of the stump.

The site is still remembered because instead of calling it Oldbridge, the Iron Bridge is now called the Obelisk bridge.

The broken tooth; by Donal Clancy

Fine fang
granite dug deep
in soft Green flesh
salivating Orange blood
a triumphant erection
of King Billy’s Boys

300 years he stood
beacon of Protestantism
act of Union
bane of Papacy
and the dreaded
Home/Rome Rule

A ruin remains
of the unwisdom tooth
extracted by three men.
Timelessly by
the Boyne water flows
from Oldbridge to Newgrange
towards a Nation
once again?

-=o0o=-

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