TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT

Our image of the Orange parades in Northern Ireland is of dour, sober marchers in sashes and bowler hats. But the real action for tomorrow's march, says Fionnuala O'Connor, takes place this evening, when the young Protestant revellers take to the streets of Belfast

EVERY YEAR, a slogan has been repainted on gable walls in Northern Ireland in anticipation of the 12 July parade: "We are the people." These photographs show these people, the revellers who turn out for "the Twelfth" - not the marchers we are familiar with, those dour-looking Unionists in orange sashes parading behind drums and flutes and banners, but the spectators. They celebrate not just the Twelfth but also the Eleventh, the night of beer and bonfires that precedes the marching.

The Twelfth is a commemoration of the victory 300 years ago of the Protestant William of Orange over the Catholic James II. For Protestant working-class families, the Twelfth also came to mark the start of the annual holiday, a fortnight in which shipyards and light engineering works were closed down.

The escapist atmosphere persists, though now many of the celebrants are unemployed. The days of nearly full employment for urban Protestants have gone; joblessness, once the curse of Catholics, is now familiar in Sandy Row and Donegall Road, the Belfast heartlands in which these pictures were taken. Catholics have become the new majority in the city, and the power of the Orangemen has waned. In the parades, white-gloved, dark-suited men in bowler hats are accompanied by bare-headed young men with brawny forearms. When the marchers reach the "Fields" tomorrow for the ritual speeches and prayers, the Orange leaders on the platforms will recite the mantras "this we will maintain" and "no surrender", but with increasing desperation. They will probably be ignored by all except the front few rows.

But the Twelfth still gives Loyalists a kind of communal sanction for anti-social behaviour. A few years ago Belfast's Catholic newspaper the Irish News ran a large photograph of two policemen in flak jackets beside six youths holding beer-cans to their mouths; all were standing directly under one of the city council's fine new "No Drinking" signs.

The Belfast parades take place in a sea of alcohol. The front ranks may be sedate, but over the past few years motorists behind the last marchers have often encountered bandsmen staggering to urinate against the nearest wall. This sub-section of society wears its politics on its sleeve - or, more precisely, needled into its arms, in red, white and blue. The tattoos display a range of sentiments: "For God and Ulster" shares arm space with "Kill all Taigs", as well as with unrealistically curvaceous blondes and statements of support for Glasgow Rangers.

The marchers tattoo their districts, too, in flags and bunting and carefully erected arches. Kerbstones are freshly painted, murals on gable walls touched up for the summer - there are classics such as King Billy on his white horse as well as the warriors of what just might now be yesterday: the paramilitary UVF and Ulster Freedom Fighters.

The daytime parades provide powerful tribal bonding. But outsiders hardly ever focus on the even more striking ritual of the night before, at the scores of "bonies" in Belfast's back streets. These are all leaping flames, silhouettes and shadows. People start drinking beside the unlit bonfires weeks before the Eleventh, and on the night itself the biggest fires are held where the jobs are scarcest. Irish Tricolours and effigies of the Pope blaze on top of the fires. This year there may also be effigies of Sinn Fein leaders, and of the spokesmen of the Catholic residents groups which oppose marches in their areas.

There is little structure at Eleventh Night bonfires, but there are customs: fast-food vans, flag-sellers, stalls blaring out tapes and CDs of loyalist songs, some of them bloodthirsty. Bands straggle towards the flames, people dance when they are drunk enough. Children wave their own small flags, twirl their batons. This community, like the Republicans it fears, initiates its young early. At each confrontation between marchers and Catholic residents at Drumcree, foreign television crews have homed in on babies wearing bibs that read: "Born to walk the Garvaghy Road".

There is menace in the bonfire world. As matches are set to the towering piles of old furniture that have been gathered over the weeks, not even middle-class Protestants, let alone Catholics, come to watch the fires blaze up. On the morning of the Twelfth, there is scorched earth where the bonfires have been: blackened footpaths and gable walls, broken glass, vomit.

None the less, for a night and a day or two Ulster is Protestant and British again, the changing world around the revellers invisible in the darkness, or drowned out by the drums.