Flag issue shows some still view Northern Ireland as foreign country

THE Garda Siochana had a difficult and sensitive task to carry out in persuading Willie Frazer and his motley crew not to come to Dublin tomorrow to demand that the Irish flag be removed from Leinster House (where it wouldn’t be flying anyway because it doesn’t fly over the houses of the Oireachtas when the Dáil and Seanad are not sitting).

They had to be careful how they phrased any rejection of Frazer’s demand to march, given that he had been making a big issue of how he wanted to exercise his democratic right to do so. Now there would be some who would argue that he had no such right as someone who is insistent that he should be recognised only as a British citizen. He has the right to march in Belfast, Westminster or any other part of Britain that he so chooses, subject to whatever local rules apply, but why should that dispensation apply south of the border?

Well, all sorts of efforts have to be made to accommodate those from Northern Ireland who we might regard as Irish, as well as British, even if they don’t think of themselves as the former. Deny them their “rights” and it gives them the opportunity to complain loudly and long about institutional discrimination, about there not being a genuine inclusiveness despite all such invitations. Stopping them at the border might have been a temptation, but the implications of preventing what they claimed they intended to be a peaceful protest would have been serious and noted internationally.