I DON’T like the union jack much.
I grew up among adults – teachers some of them – who routinely referred to the flag as the Butcher’s Apron. As small boys in the teeming terraces of the Lower Whack and later in the brand new avenues and drives in the shadow of the Black Mountain, we had a Dracula-garlic relationship with the British flag that had been passed on so effectively and naturally that actively disliking the union jack was as natural as blessing yourself on the bus when passing a church.
As a man of a certain age (hat tip to Gregg) I can’t blame anybody else now for the fact that I still don’t like the union jack. I can try and justify it to myself by saying it’s hard-wired or baked-in after years of having it waved in my face and just about every other part of my body, and while I can quite legitimately point out that it’s just not possible to make yourself stop disliking something, much less start liking it, that aversion is down to me now and me alone.
If it’s any consolation to those who hold the flag dear, I do feel a vague guilt about the whole thing, an inchoate sense that I’m betraying the ideals of goodwill and tolerance whose lack I’m not slow to deplore in others.
With that bit of epistemic housekeeping out of the way, let me say I fully understand that the union jack is going nowhere on this part of our island. I’m all in favour of it being flown when and where appropriate and, what’s more, like the statue of Queen Victoria in the RVH, I wouldn’t make it go away even if I had the magic power to do so. Because get this: It’s part of who I am. That may be an easier confession to make for someone with a name like mine and a Planter heritage, but in the Roddy’s and the PD, it’s still a big deal.
Now the Ulster flag/banner – that’s King Billy’s horse of a different colour. I acknowledge the extreme difficulty – not to say impossibility – that would be involved in excising the union jack from our public square, but I’m left perplexed by the failure of a single unionist voice to speak out in favour of giving Commonwealth athletes another flag to excel under. Ripping Empire yarns were never for me, but I can understand how the long military and political history of the union jack can stir the passions of proud British unionists. The Ulster flag, on the other hand, became the ‘official flag of Northern Ireland’ the year Tenzing Norgay climbed Everest and the most notable battle at which it has been flown was Burntollet.
Unionists are dead-set against equivalence for the union jack and the tricolour, and putting myself in their marching shoes, I can fully understand that. But relinquishing one of the two flags they’ve got would seem like a fairly simple way of setting off on the journey of outreach they keep claiming to have bought a ticket for. Throw in the fact the Ulster flag has no official status and away from lampposts is used only as confusion-avoidance in the world of sport and I’d have thought we’re pushing at a door marked ‘No-Brainers Only’.
But no. ’Parntly unionists hold the half-a-millennium-old union jack in precisely the same esteem as a flag that’s the same age as Hulk Hogan. Indeed, such is the oddly impassioned attachment to the Ulster flag, that the reliably excitable unionist commentator Owen Polley in the News Letter outdid himself by bewailing the prospect of a new Commonwealth Games flag under the headline ‘Pandering to NI haters over the Ulster Banner is doomed to fail’.
True, in recent years the News Letter had read daily like an MRI scan of hardline unionism’s Irish Sea border breakdown, but dismissing those who’d like young athletes to gather under a flag all of them can relate to in such terms is a telling indicator of how difficult it’s going to be to persuade unionism to make a gesture of conciliation that might actually be difficult.
