SQUINTER’S not disappointed exactly after having seen for the first time the damage done to the portrait of former DUP Lord Mayor Wallace Browne. Who could be disappointed at a work of art being marred in any way? And he’s not surprised exactly, because, let’s be honest here, a picture being damaged at a party isn’t exactly the strangest thing that’s ever happened in the storied history of our premier public building.
So let’s say instead that Squinter’s a wee bit of both. Disappointed and surprised. Disapprised, you might say. Surpointed, even.
The righteous indignation with which our Fourth Estate launched itself into this crime against humanity had convinced Squinter that the heavens cried out for justice; that Sinn Féin heads needed to roll, that those heads were of a senior and of a female variety; that hard time needed to be served.
And so when scene-of-crime pix were released Squinter drew a deep breath before clicking and opening the images. Because the painting had to be a pile of ashes, hadn’t it? Or if it hadn’t been set fire to, it was bound to be slashed to ribbons, pockmarked and still sizzling with sulphuric acid, or unseen under a thick layer of oil-based paint.
But they only broke the glass. By they, Squinter means the person or persons who, accidentally or deliberately, broke the pane of glass from under which the splendidly attired Lord Mayor Browne gazes quizzically out at the gilded domain he once ruled. Clearly, breaking glass is not a good idea, and if the glass was broken deliberately it becomes an even less good idea
But if the release of the pictures was designed to breathe new life into an ailing story, it had rather the opposite effect. Because even those most thoroughly disgusted by the incident – Jo Soaps, elected reps, media moralists – can only have shrugged their shoulders on seeing the extent of the destruction. The sack of Rome it very definitely was not.
The good news is that common sense won out in the end. After taking a look at the pictures, and after a bit of harrumphing and light coughing, Loyal Ulster decided that it wasn’t in fact something that warranted importing rifles from the Kaiser’s Germany over, and so they let the matter drop. Without breaking any glass, needless to say.
Battle of the flags is the latest clash in the culture wars
COUNCILLOR Sarah Bunting, leader of the DUP group on Belfast City Council, thinks the Palestine flag is the Hamas flag.
It’s a fairly mainstream position within unionism and within pro-Israel and Zionist circles, despite the fact that it’s so clearly bonkers that it would fail the theory MoT before it was driven through the big shutter doors.
Sarah was setting out her Christmas Market stall in response to a Twitter debate on the Bondi Beach massacre during which Alliance deputy leader Eoin Tennyson laid out the party’s position on flags and displays at City Hall. Briefly, and in the hope that Sarah will accept Squinter’s précis of her words as representative, the Botanic rep argued that since Alliance argued in opposing the lighting of City Hall in blue and white for October 7 that the colours of the Israeli flag represented the Israeli government, so the Palestinian flag must represent Hamas.
Ordinarily you’d say that Sarah has a point. After all, the chances of us putting up a Russia flag or lighting the dome in white, blue and red if Russia suffered a deadly catastrophe are zero. Indeed, the Russian flag is banned from most international sporting events because of its invasion of Ukraine.
But because it was decided nearly 80 years ago that those who most deserved punishment for the Nazi Holocaust were a pastoral people in West Asia who had nothing to do with it, Palestine today consists of a number of different Israeli-occupied territories, only one of which is governed by Hamas. Of the others, the West Bank is governed by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and East Jerusalem is ruled by an awkward and uneasy mélange consisting of Israel and the PA.
So unless Sarah is under the impression that Palestine consists only of Gaza, the proposition that the Palestine flag is a Hamas flag is profoundly unrobust. But if that suggestion wouldn’t withstand close inspection, Sarah’s contention that a national flag belongs to the ruling party brings us from the politics/history section of the library into the children’s corner. Is the union jack the flag of the Labour Party? Is the Irish tricolour the flag of Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, or the French one the flag of En Marche or Renaissance? And the firm answer comes – disappointingly for Sarah – no. No, they are not. Worse, no-one in the chaotic history of these flags, these countries and these parties has ever so much as suggested that they are.
Tragically, this little corner of Paradise has no flag. But the Assembly does: it’s a true-blue linen plant with six flowers reminding us that Lord Carson dumped three counties for a quiet life that never came. You can have that flag if you like, Sarah.
Squinter was at City Hall the night the Palestine flag went up and he noticed that the proud sons and daughters of Carson who gathered in their tens to chainsmoke/ vape and occasionally protest the raising didn’t call it the Hamas flag. They just called it a terrorist flag. And while that’s far from a satisfactory solution, it’s so utterly vague as to be meaningless, and as we know all too well here, if people have no idea what you’re talking about you can go an awfully long way.
