As we were travelling along the Westlink in Belfast the other day on our way to visit friends in Hillsborough, our younger son pointed out something on top of a building. 'Look, the Ireland flag!' he said. The building, as many of you will be aware was Divis Tower. He did not notice the Union flag and Northern Ireland flag on Clifton Street Orange Hall as we passed it a few seconds later (largely because he was still trying to point out the Irish flag to his less observant older brother)!
However his innocent observation got me thinking. I am quite certain that when I was 7 years old I would have been aware of a deeper significance to all of the flags that I saw. It is a significance which, I am glad to say is completely lost on my 7 and 9 year old boys.
I might not have been able to express it but somehow I would have felt threatened by an Irish flag, just as others would have felt threatened by a Union flag. There are still some people who seek to use national flags as a symbols of threat and intimidation in N.Ireland but it seems to me that their power over many of us is diminishing. Perhaps that is why, as the twelfth of July approaches, the Union flags and N. Ireland flags are increasingly interspersed by paramilitary flags that let people know exactly who is supposed to be in charge in a particular area. The national flags just don't carry the same level of threat any more.
Without having the vocabulary to say so my seven year old self might even have been aware that there were people who were ready to kill in the service of the political aspiration represented by these flags. As adults we know that there are still a handful of (very dangerous) people who think this way but they are nowhere near as relevant to our daily lives as they were 30 years ago. The result of their irrelevance is that fear of 'the other side' has lessened and the possibility of a genuinely 'shared future' is a real one.
Northern Ireland is a different country from the one in which I was a seven year old who knew that I was a Protestant and that there were other people called Catholics who were suspicious of me and of whom I was to be suspicious. It is a place which, even in the midst of the worst recession in thirty years, feels like a good place to live and raise children.
The past from which we have emerged seems alien and unreal and it is a past of which my children are completely unaware. At some point soon they will learn that, not long before they were born, there were people here who were willing to kill for the meanings they had invested in those flags. Maybe it is wrong of me, but I would prefer their innocence regarding the past to remain for as long as possible. Maybe that is just because I will find it difficult to explain how we allowed ourselves to get into that mess. I know that one day I will have to explain it and I pray that I will explain it to them in such a way that they become men who are determined to play their part in ensuring that we never return to being that other country again.
