David Mitchell

Here’s an idea that started out as a daydream-rant then escalated into this footnoted little essay.

It’s not an original idea, but perhaps now, we’re could be ready for it.

The problems are well known. Trying to explain to children ’where’ they are from and what ‘their’ flag is. You watch the Olympics – or simply drive down the street – and have to give a history lecture, after which they are none the wiser.

Then there is the political dispute. The Commission on Flags, Identity, Culture, and Tradition (FICT), which reported in December 2021, was tasked with coming up with an answer to the question of the flying of flags in various settings, and other cultural conflicts. It couldn’t find agreement, just as there was no agreement two decades earlier during the Agreement talks.

Maybe Northern Ireland – whose name is even contested – is simply un-representable in a symbol.

But there are two things about this place that surely could, and should, be represented.

One is a northern regional identity. We can debate what this might mean – accent, Scottish influence (not only important for Protestants), weather, coastline, the conflict, the interface of Britishness and Irishness, and probably lots more. But I think most people of all backgrounds feel that it exists and it does so beyond, or on top of, the binary of Irish and British.[1] And that neither the Union flag nor Irish tricolour captures it.

The other thing is the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. The Agreement is one of the things that’s unique about Northern Ireland and it expresses the north’s uniqueness. The three sets of relationships, the ambiguity and inclusivity. Pretty much everyone supports the Agreement. But it’s hard to think of many symbols of peace, reconciliation, and the Agreement. We’ve left that role to big shiny new buildings. [2]

A new flag

The idea of a new flag that people of Catholic, Protestant, other, and immigrant community backgrounds could identify with is not new, as I discovered when I was writing this post. The report of the FICT Commission briefly floats the idea of creating a ‘civic’ flag that might take some heat out of the flag dispute.[3] Intrigued, I emailed one of the chairs of the Commission, Professor Dominic Bryan, who said that he, for one, had long advocated this. I’ve heard the idea mentioned from time to time in the past. The Alliance Party proposed something like this back in 2003.

So how about the image above? It’s been in my head for a few years. The green is the landscape. The grey, the skies. The quintessential look of this place.

No ideological colours, no pre-existing symbols. The scenery and climate are shared by everyone. They are what we love and love to complain about; everywhere and everyone’s. You can’t not see them at almost every turn. My nine-year-old thinks it’s a bit sad to represent cloudy skies. I had to tell him he was wrong. Clouds sustain life! But the exact shade of grey would be important. We could call it ‘silver’.[4]

In fact, green and grey are also the standard hues of all of Ireland and of Britain, so this flag is open for people to read broader identifications into it too. And Nordic-ness and northern Europeanness for that matter.

There’s plenty of precedent for this approach. Flags around the world symbolise natural features of the country, from the yellow on the Barbados flag (the beaches) to the white on the Finland flag (the snow). And there’s surely a local lesson in how the power-sharing Executive agreed on the hexagon pattern of the Giant’s Causeway stones for its logo. If you want consensus, look to nature.  

Introducing the flag

An optimist might say that after 26 years, we have the political maturity to think about this. Unionists would still want the Union flag flown, but at least the ‘symbolic landscape’ would shift towards the actual, existing diversity – and sharedness – of where we are. There are examples of sorts in how the rugby and football bodies have promoted non-political colours, over more divisive flags, at their matches. Perhaps this flag could be of use to them.  

And there’s another scenario in which this flag might be valuable.

Those pushing for a united Ireland have their own flag problem. If it happens, the tricolour will probably have to go. Many unionists link it with the IRA, and nonaligned ‘others’ think its orange and green excludes them.[5] If this new flag was embraced in the north, and if there someday was constitutional change towards unity, the flag could be adopted officially for the island. If it was found to be acceptable in the north, there is a very good chance it would be acceptable in the south.[6]

In the meantime, the silver and green, or something like it, could fly in, and in relation to, Northern Ireland – not as a ‘Northern Ireland’ flag, but as a northern, civic flag. Not a flag of a history, ideology, or political goal, but of a place – without neat borders – and the people who happen to inhabit it.

It would be a flag for all – even, and especially, for people who don’t like flags.

So that’s my pitch. I don’t know if this idea will, eh, fly. But it’s an interesting thing to think about on another overcast, late summer day in Belfast.

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[1] Claire Hanna, a nationalist, spoke warmly of this identity recently.

[2] No existing flag stands for, as the 2020 New Decade, New Approach agreement put it, the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose, while acknowledging and accommodating those within our community who define themselves as ‘other’ and those who form our ethnic and newcomer communities.

[3] ‘This would not be a regional flag or a National flag, but rather a Civic flag that would be designed to be representative of the diversity of our society, including our new communities’ (p. 113).

[4] I thought of adding a stripe of blue to indicate the sea, but then it wouldn’t be blue if the sky is grey, right?

[5] Brendan O’Leary, the academic who has thought through a united Ireland as much as anyone, considers options from existing Irishy symbols. ‘There is no easy or obvious replacement’ for the tricolour, he writes. Like most nationalists, he’d like to keep it, but thinks opinion could change if a good alternative was found.

[6] Unionists would have the satisfaction, if they want, that their northern emblem had edged out the tricolour.