Belfast's union flag debate kicks loyalist communities while they're down

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/05/belfast-union-flag-loyalists

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On Monday night, as Belfast's shops kept their doors open for the first of three weeks of late-night Christmas shopping, the city made the news again – for all the wrong reasons. Loyalists were once again at the forefront of the controversy. This time, however, their anxieties have a different texture, and are best understood in the context of ongoing republican and nationalist agitation as well as concerns about the very existence of the union.

For decades, the union flag flew proudly over Belfast's city hall. The building, a gleaming example of baroque revival architecture built in 1906, is the civic centrepiece of a once great industrial city. Recently Sinn Fein and the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP), in association with the Alliance party, have proposed that rather than flying it on 365 days a year, the flag should only fly on designated days – or as Sinn Fein and the SDLP would prefer, never.

The middle-ground Alliance party, which trades on a kind of "Lib Dem-lite" brand of politics, sided with the republicans and nationalists on a compromise motion which meant that the drawing down of the flag on all but designated days was a fait accompli. When the motion was passed by 29 votes to 21, scuffles had already broken out at the city hall.

The violence won't make anyone listen to the Protestant working class who comprised the majority of those who turned up at the city hall, coming from economically disenfranchised loyalist areas in Belfast such as the Shankill, Tiger's Bay and Dee Street. If anything, it will isolate them further from popular opinion.

However, the passion demonstrated by the protesters before things turned nasty illustrates how important the union flag and Belfast's city hall continue to be, symbolically linking the rest of the UnK to swaths of unionists and loyalists in Northern Ireland. The academic Steve Bruce once unkindly stated: "When Ulster Protestants talk about being British, it is clear that the Britain they have in mind is no more recent than the 1950s, and often their points of reference are positively Victorian."

To many observers of events at the city hall, Bruce's words will ring true. For critics of loyalism the protest came across as a combination of antiquated jingoism and the kind of ugly, reactionary violence that dominated the early decades of the 20th century. This does not mean that contemporary loyalist anxieties about a flag should be easily dismissed.

Sinn Fein's desire to see the union flag removed from the city hall may not be written into its manifesto – but it is abundantly clear in its passive-aggressive politicking that this is an orchestrated tactic. The message is obvious: destroy unionist and loyalist confidence and the rest will follow. In fact, the message hasn't changed that much since the summer of 1971, when the then Sinn Fein president Ruairi O'Bradaigh claimed: "We're on a high road to freedom, and what we need to do now is to rock Stormont and to keep it rocking until Stormont comes down."

Given the wider context in which this motion emerged, it is not quite as surprising that unionists and loyalists have reacted in such a manner. The union has never before been so brittle. The prospect of Scottish independence is a spectre that haunts most politically sophisticated unionists in Northern Ireland. If Alex Salmond gets his way, the "narrow sea" could become a vast ocean. Many loyalist communities in Northern Ireland are still trying to come to terms with the legacy of the Troubles.

The Belfast agreement has simply not delivered the dividends that were promised to the very poorest Protestant constituencies in Northern Ireland. The harsh economic principles of the coalition government at Westminster have compounded this misery. In this climate, debates over the very essence of the union have accelerated loyalist angst and the reaction has been predictably combustible.

Indeed the frictions at the city hall over the flying of the union flag put one in mind of the Anglo-Irish agreement controversy of the mid-1980s. The city hall staged a massive protest gathering at the time, led by Ian Paisley and James Molyneaux, which was designed to highlight unionist disgust at the British and Irish governments' meddling in Northern Irish affairs. On the one hand, unionist and loyalist confidence in the British government has never been revived since 1985, while on the other, the constant shots across the bow from a highly confident Sinn Fein have shredded the nerves of those who turned up to protest about the flag being removed.

Republicans and nationalists may feel justified in questioning the need for the union flag to fly over Belfast's city hall in this "shared" post-agreement era. They would claim that their rights were enshrined by the accord of April 1998. Yet there is a feeling that they could perhaps have picked a better time to bring this debate to the fore. Loyalist communities in particular are at their very lowest ebb socially, politically and economically. A cynic might point to this and suggest that nationalists and republicans have purposefully chosen to strike when the proverbial iron is hot.

Surely parties such as Sinn Fein and the SDLP would not direct such aggressive politics on to the very fringes of society, given that they continually preach about social, economic and political rights? If community relations have been damaged on this occasion, Sinn Fein, the SDLP and Alliance need only look in their respective mirrors.