The chair and chief executive of the Commonwealth Games board in Northern Ireland want Stormont to design a new flag for the region. While that might seem like an audacious request, it is merely asking the Northern Executive to get on with an overdue job.
Ten years ago this month, the five main Stormont parties agreed to set up a Commission on Flags, Identity, Culture and Tradition (FICT) to address problems raised by the loyalist flag protests and other endless arguments over symbols.
The commission, comprising independent experts and members from the five parties, was established in 2016 by the DUP and Sinn Féin first and deputy first ministers. Its final report, delivered to the office of the first ministers in 2021, discusses “the possibility of developing a new civic flag”. The report has been sitting on the shelf ever since.
The Commonwealth Games is one of several sporting organisations to use the Ulster Banner, the emblem of the old Stormont government, which served as the de facto flag of Northern Ireland until 1973. The flag is associated exclusively with unionism, and members of the Commonwealth Games board say this makes it inappropriate for a cross-community team. They add many athletes are simply indifferent to it, as it fell out of widespread use long before they were born.
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Northern Ireland’s official flag is the UK’s union flag, which confuses everybody when applied to a regional team.
The fundamental problem with a flag for Northern Ireland is that the very concept is inherently unionist. The design scarcely matters. It could be a picture of Gerry Adams and still be a triumph for unionism, as long as it secured some degree of cross-community acceptance. Yet the DUP and the TUV have immediately denounced the Commonwealth Games request. The DUP’s rejection is fatal, as it can veto any decision by the Executive.
Once again, unionism is demonstrating its boundless capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Silence from nationalism indicates it knows its opponent well. Why be seen to reject something positive when unionists will sabotage it for you?
The term “civic flag” is an attempt to square this circle. FICT defines it as neither “a regional flag or a national flag” but rather one “designed to be representative of the diversity of our society”. This seems like a semantic distinction. In any case, the term has also been applied to the Ulster Banner.
Alternative designs have been discussed in the media and online for many years, albeit in brief episodes whenever the topic makes headlines. The commonest suggestions involve St Patrick’s cross, the red hand of Ulster, or variations or combinations thereof. Every proposal manages to provoke a furious objection from some quarter.
One exception is the emblem of the Northern Ireland Assembly, adopted after the Belfast Agreement – six flax plants representing the six counties, in a stylised blue design on a white background. A similar image represented Northern Ireland on British coinage in the 1980s. The potential of this as a civic flag has been almost completely overlooked, despite its obvious attraction as an uncontentious motif in well-established use. The flax plant might be bland and its symbolism trite, but the same could be said of the Tricolour. Its truce between orange and green is the sort of naff literalism a Stormont committee might come up with, had the Republic not got to it first.
The flax design is difficult to draw, something flags should supposedly avoid, yet a third of the world’s national flags contain heraldry or images that make them impossible to draw. Besides, in this digital age, who needs to draw a flag? The stylised flax is barely more complex than New Zealand’s silver fern flag, rejected by referendum in 2016 but still considered a strong design.
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Although Stormont does not use its emblem as a flag, the old Stormont did not use the Ulster Banner as a flag until 1953. This historical precedent is striking, and possibly counterproductive.
As there will never be initial agreement on a design, or even the concept of a new flag, there is a lot to be said for anything that can readily be run up the flagpole and kept there until everyone gets used to it. FICT suggested a civic flag might fly alongside the union flag on public buildings, to prove it was not a replacement. Nobody is suggesting the Ulster Banner be banned. People could continue bringing it to sporting events, although it might come to be seen as the equivalent of booing Ireland’s Call at a rugby match. Quiet disapproval is a powerful social force.
Unfortunately, the assembly has reserved copyright on the flax design, so it cannot be used without permission, which the DUP would presumably withhold. At least that suggests a motto for Northern Ireland: for flax sake.