Leona O’Neill: Why can the few dictate to the many?

I remember bringing an English TV journalist to a loyalist area of Belfast to do a story. It was July time, marching season.

We stood on the path as union flags the size of king-size bed sheets fluttered from the lamp posts. There were murals of members of the royal family or British symbols at the end of almost every gaze. Union flag bunting zig-zagged from one side of the street to the other. People wore their heart, and their colours, on their sleeves.

I’m going to be honest, I didn’t even notice. It’s normal – we don’t really bat an eyelid here at such sights. But he – having been all over the world, but never to Northern Ireland – stood slack-jawed at the sight.

Here was a man who was as English as they come, with a slick television voice that made him sound like he was descended from the Queen herself, astounded at the Britishness of this particular corner of the world.

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In England they don’t wear their Britishness as vibrantly as we do, they don’t fly it from every lamp post, or remind themselves of it every time they pass a gable wall. Margaret Thatcher once said that Northern Ireland was a “British as Finchley” and I think my television reporter friend went away with the same notion.

It’s hard to explain to people who are not from here why we wear our colours so very loudly. Flags and emblems certainly reflect our identities, but are also used to mark territory, to intimidate, to make sure folks know where they are and indeed if they are welcome there or not.

I was travelling for work this week and passed a beautiful new housing development just outside Derry. Shiny new windows and slick new doors shone in the sunlight and dozens of union flags fluttered at the entrance, alongside a few parachute regiment ones.

Anyone viewing the gorgeous show home would be under no illusion that those who erected the flags – despite no doubt the property developers hoping to attract anyone and everyone – only wanted folks of a certain persuasion living there.

In 2024 this practice has become commonplace. Beautiful housing estates are springing up across Northern Ireland, and before the workmen’s magnolia paint is dried in the new living rooms there are men up ladders, bedecking the place in union and ‘Ulster’ flags, marking their territory.

Just last week politicians in the Antrim area were condemning the painting of kerbs and the placing of flags in a new-build estate as families prepared to move in.

And at the weekend the specially altered home of a nine-year-old disabled boy, Jessy Clark, was targeted in what police were describing as a sectarian-motivated hate crime. His great-grandmother said that the child, who lives with spina bifida and uses a wheelchair, has ‘nowhere else to go’.

It’s a strange thing indeed that in 2024 we still have to live under flags, in fear. That areas are still branded ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’ depending on what often-tattered and sodden, weather-beaten flag flies limply from lampposts.

What exactly has changed for the better in the last 26 years when our peace lines grow higher, reinforced with more barbed wire, our communities are bedecked with flags of all kinds and colours, and there are those who insist on marking their territory like dogs?

What exactly has changed for the better in the last 26 years when our peace lines grow higher, our communities are bedecked with flags of all kinds and colours, and there are those who insist on marking their territory like dogs?

Back in 2022, flags were banned from new-build housing developments across Northern Ireland when legal text was inserted into the small print of homeowner contracts. Private developers are increasingly including a clause in transfer deeds that prevents home buyers from displaying flags or putting up flag poles. According to reports, a homeowner could face legal action if they break these rules, which warns them “not to affix on the exterior of the premises or display anywhere on the premises any flag or flag pole”.

Private developers seem to firmly grasp that the placing of flags in new developments is intimidating and will prevent them selling their houses. Whether anyone sticks to the rules or not, or indeed is prosecuted for erecting a flag, is yet to be seen. Flags in these new developments are traditionally on lamp posts and therefore not the property of the homeowners. And who polices the lamp posts?

It’s a complicated picture, as always. This is Northern Ireland. And as such, there might be a small minority of people who physically climb the lamp post and insist on erecting flags, but there are even more people who are afraid to take them down. The few dictate to the many.

It’s the story of our lives.