DRAFT Flags – Oslo, November 2005 Flagging Peace: Symbolic Space in a new Northern Ireland Dominic Bryan Institute of Irish Studies Queen’s University Belfast d.bryan@qub.ac.uk Abstract Northern Ireland has been subject to a peace process since the early 1990s culminating in the signing of the Multi-party Agreement in 1998. The agreement was an attempt, using a broadly consociational model, to manage the relationship between the Catholic/Nationalist Protestant/ Unionist political communities. This paper explores the management of this inter-group conflict through symbols and rituals in a context where mutually exclusive claims previously predominated. The paper will look at the use of space and symbols, but will concentrate specifically upon the use of flags by government and local authorities. It will conclude that the peace process has not been marked by many creative attempts to develop inclusive symbols or events despite, or maybe because, of the terms of the 1998 Agreement. You might ask mockingly: “A flag? What’s that? A stick with a rag on it?” No sire, a flag is much more. With a flag you lead men, for a flag, men live and die. In fact, it is the only thing for which they are ready to die in their masses, if you train them for it. Believe me, the politics of an entire people…can be manipulated only through the imponderables that float in the air. Theodore Herzl Quoted in Robert Justin Goldstein Saving “Old Glory”: The History of the American Flag Desecration Controversy (Boulder: Westview Press 1995) In 1998 a Multi-Party (Good Friday or Belfast) Agreement (hereafter called The Agreement) was signed in Northern Ireland which, it was hoped would lay the basis for a political settlement in Northern Ireland. It was done against a back drop of 30 years of political violence resulting in around 3,500 deaths. In this paper I would like to explore the issues over the use of symbols, particularly flags, after the Agreement. I will look at what the Agreement and how elements of the Agreement have been interpreted in terms of legislation and policy. I then want to look specifically at the ramifications for the flying of official flags over Government buildings and local Councils and the use of flags in popular displays. The Multi-Party Agreement set a new political context affirming the current position of Northern Ireland within the UK but also recognising the particular circumstances of these six counties. It is a consociational type agreement recognising the existence of two (and effectively only two) political communities, that of Ulster Unionism and Irish Nationalism. It did this by creating a unique set of political institutions governing power-sharing and the relationship between the United Kingdom and the Republic or Ireland The participants endorse the commitment made by the British and Irish Governments that, in a new British-Irish Agreement replacing the Anglo- Irish Agreement, they will: 1