As always, our flag-hugging \u201cpatriots\u201d were late to the game. <\/p>\n
In 2021 at the height of Covid, they paraded maskless in Dublin city wrapped in the Tricolour, roaring \u201ctraitor\u201d and \u201cpaedo\u201d 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. <\/p>\n
Last August, when they took the Tricolour from Coolock<\/a> to join their Union Jack-flying pals in Belfast<\/a> \u2013 attacking police and workers, setting fire to modest livelihoods \u2013 it was a straight lift from the ongoing anti-immigrant Southport riots, but one purporting to speak in our name.<\/p>\n So anyone paying attention to the national flag campaign playing out across English towns in recent months \u2013 where patriots have hung thousands of flags half way up lamp-posts and spent precious hours painting the St George\u2019s Cross on mini-roundabouts, vans, pedestrian crossings and random white paint splashes \u2013 might have anticipated that massed Tricolours would shortly fly across areas of Dublin. While Dublin City Council<\/a> considers how to respond, those defending the flag fetishists\u2019 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 \u201cashamed\u201d of their own flag and therefore their own country?<\/p>\n [\u00a0\u2018Pack your bags, son\u2019: inside the live-streamed right-wing protests against asylum hotels in BritainOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n On Monday, Declan Ganley<\/a> posted a lovely photograph of the Tricolour flying high at his private Galway estate, taken on the centenary of the 1916 Rising. \u201cNo one is coming to take this down,\u201d he said. He\u2019s quite right. Absolutely no one is coming to take it down. Why would they? <\/p>\n The answer to the performative bafflement is that it\u2019s 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 that 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 in order to make their deposits at a higher angle so as to appear larger than their actual size. One is well known to me. <\/p>\n These arguments are already well rehearsed across England. The claim that they\u2019re all about national pride and patriotism is followed in the next breath by the earnest statement that the holders are just protecting \u201cour women and girls\u201d from assault by migrants. Yet more than four in 10 <\/a>of those arrested for last summer\u2019s UK riots (following the little girls\u2019 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. <\/p>\n