As always, our flag-hugging “patriots” were late to the game.
In 2021 at the height of Covid, they paraded maskless in Dublin city wrapped in the Tricolour, roaring “traitor” and “paedo” and threatening to lynch public figures. The template for the grim circus was lifted whole from the Trump/QAnon playbook. The national flag was just a prop.
Last August, when they took the Tricolour from Coolock to join their Union Jack-flying pals in Belfast – attacking police and workers, setting fire to modest livelihoods – it was a straight lift from the ongoing anti-immigrant Southport riots, but one purporting to speak in our name.
So anyone paying attention to the national flag campaign playing out across English towns in recent months – where patriots have hung thousands of flags half way up lamp-posts and spent precious hours painting the St George’s Cross on mini-roundabouts, vans, pedestrian crossings and random white paint splashes – might have anticipated that massed Tricolours would shortly fly across areas of Dublin. While Dublin City Council considers how to respond, those defending the flag fetishists’ actions as simple manifestations of national pride bring disingenuity to new levels. They wonder round-eyed why other flags are allowed and why objectors are so “ashamed” of their own flag and therefore their own country.
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On Monday, Declan Ganley posted a lovely photograph of the Tricolour flying high at his private Galway estate, taken on the centenary of the 1916 Rising. “No one is coming to take this down,” he said. He’s quite right. Absolutely no one is coming to take it down. Why would they?
The answer to the performative bafflement is that it’s all about context. If Ganley tried to hang a Tricolour on every Galway city lamp-post next week, would he be surprised if other city dwellers inferred he was using public property to send a private message? Flags suddenly massed on public streets without context bring to mind those small male dogs who officiously patrol and mark their territory with copious dribbles of urine, often raising a leg while peeing to make their deposits at a higher angle so as to appear larger than their actual size. One is well known to me.
These arguments are already well rehearsed across England. The claim that they’re all about national pride and patriotism is followed in the next breath by the earnest statement that the holders are just protecting “our women and girls” from assault by migrants. Yet more than four in 10 of those arrested for last summer’s UK riots (following the little girls’ murders) had been reported for prior domestic abuse. Almost half those arrested for race hate disorder in Belfast last August had previously been reported to the Police Service of Northern Ireland for domestic abuse. Would data in the Republic be any different? The irony is off the scale.
The latest eruption of British flag-posturing was tracked by BBC reporters back to mid-July and to a story about a 12-year-old girl in the town of Rugby who was prevented from making a speech about being British in her school, while wearing a Union Jack-themed dress.
She chose the outfit for “culture celebration day”, for which pupils were asked to wear cultural dress. The school got it wrong and later offered “unreserved apologies” to the girl over the incident.
But the lads of the Birmingham district of Weoley Castle felt persecuted enough to form the Weoley Warriors, which soon had an online crowdfunder “for flags, poles and cable ties”.
This spawned the hashtag “operation raise the colours”, and numerous excited pictures of flag locations. One of the busiest flag-bedecked roads in Birmingham features the St George’s and union flags, the Scottish saltire and Welsh dragon and, for some reason, the Irish Tricolour.
Andy Burnham, the two-term mayor of Greater Manchester commented that anyone obviously “can display a flag if that’s your choice but I do wonder about the times we’re living in ... It’s like people are seeking confrontation”.
Flags encode history, home, culture, values. My heart has leapt at the sight of the Tricolour in lonely places, but grown-ups also know that flags in particular contexts can convey wholly different messages for different people. At a 2013 election party, Germany’s Angela Merkel abruptly whisked the national flag from a colleague’s hands in a gesture that said her party had won, not the nation. When Sinn Féin candidates began to succeed in Dáil elections, the party did the opposite; the triumphalist staged entrance of party leaders festooned in the Tricolour became a set-piece at count centres. Growing up in Ireland, we learned early on that flags can be harnessed as symbols of murderous tribalism and division. We learned to be nervous of them.
Daniel Hannan, architect of Brexit – one of the most divisive, jingoistic, failed projects in modern British history – summarised it surprisingly well in an X post: “England’s politics are becoming like Northern Ireland’s. Flags signal which group is in the majority locally. Voters are expected to back ‘their’ side. This is nothing to celebrate. Sectarian politics encourages, at best, complacency and corruption; at worst, civil strife.”
If the flag is supposed to represent us at our best, those who care about it should care deeply when it is abused and immersed in the stench of cruelty and destruction such as the Belfast riot, since it purports to speak in our name.
It’s really not difficult to separate the far right from the legitimately concerned. Or to distinguish hate speech from merely obnoxious opinion. Or to work out why flags and symbols displayed en masse without context on public property make decent people nervous. Surely we know that without having to be told?
