How strange and wonderful it was to see the green, white and orange intermingling with the red, white and blue - a harbinger of peace between identities, perhaps? No harbinger was necessary for the pennants which decorated the approaches to Brittas in County Dublin to celebrate the friendship of French and Irish. Yet is that not strange? Does that cause one to wonder about how trivial loyalty can be, and how childishly we are exercised about the meanings of colours? So a red white and blue flag which is symbolic of France or the US or Holland can be greeted warmly, but if I waved such a combination of colours to symbolise Britain, I would at best be met with a stony silence.
How odd people are.
Historians have made much of the emergence of the nation state in the past 200 years, and have attributed many of the woes of Europe to the ferocious powers such states both harness and unleash. And there is indeed a great deal to be said for the old empires of Europe - so much so that the European Union is intent on creating the next one. But the animosities which lurk within the human breast are not the invention of the romantic idealists who so worshipped at the altar of congruence between nation and state. They are old things, bred in the primate gene pool and beating in all of our hearts still.
Foreigners
The animosities which cause us to dress in colours and mark ourselves with the hues of our tribe show in the words we use about outsiders. In all western European cultures the word "gall" is used both as word for foreigner and a word for barbarian. To ancient Greeks, as any child can tell you, all foreigners were uncouth idiots who could not speak a civilised tongue, but merely communicated in barbar grunts.
The Romans despised anybody not of Rome; a man from the country was a "paganus", a mere villager, a rustic, whose backwardness survived the arrival of Christianity - hence pagan. But it was not just Romans who so despised culchies: the English regarded anyone from the heath as being pagan too - or rather heathen, as the English would put it. Against the heathen, the pagan, the intruder and the stranger, it is necessary to raise protections and throw up ramparts, made of whatever comes to hand.
A chartered surveyer, a West Belfast Catholic, doing some work in Antrim some years ago got lost. Feeling very much a stranger, he stopped to ask a man where he was. "This here is British," replied his respondent. "Aye, right, that's dead on, so it is," said the Belfast man, anxious not to get into a disagreement about the national identity of that part of Antrim. "But like, where's this here?"
"This here is British," replied the local solidly. "And always will be." "Fair play, mate," said the West Belfast Fenian. "But what I mean is, what's the name of this here place?" "I been telling you if you'd only listen," said the Antrim man. "If only you'd listen, hi. It's British."
"Point it out to me on this here map," said the visitor in mounting desperation. The native's fingernail found its way over the chart and stopped at the townland marked Brittas. "There now," muttered the local. "British."
Common name
Brittas is a common townland name in Ireland, and for good reasons. The name comes from the Irish "briotas", which is merely a Hibernian form of the little-known English word "brattice". Brattices are rare nowadays because they are an ancient, hastily erected and therefore rather impermanent form of defence made of rushes, wood and stakes. The word in current English comes from the AngloNorman word bretesche, but that in turn came from the medieval Latin, which in turn drew it from the Anglo-Saxon word brittisc, meaning British.
So the confusion in Antrim is not so far from the etymological truth: when the invading AngloSaxons came across these hastily constructed fortifications, named them after the people manning them, the Britons. But as colours can have different meanings within our odd world of tribe and sept and clan, so too can words. The Brit standing up to the Anglo-Saxon at his brattice was a Celt: and the invader named the rampart after the defender.
Yet it is the Anglo-Saxon today who is called the Brit.
Defensive system
Presumably, the townlands of Ireland called Brittas celebrate toponymically the rough defensive system erected by the natives against the Brits, or whoever. They were as much a psychological assurance as a military one, just as colours bind and reassure within the greater loyalty of the tribe. We like tribes. We feel more at ease within a tribal identification. I have only recently moved to Kildare, yet I felt an absurd, irrational and thoroughly undeserved rush of pride at the victories of the Kildare football team, whom I have never even seen in the flesh.
Why is that? Because it makes me belong, and belonging is what we all have wanted to do since as solitary infants we gazed avidly at groups of children playing together. Belonging is why we sport colours. Belonging is why our ancestors raised brattices.
Belonging is our greatest human triumph, and it is our abiding curse.