Fergus Finlay: I was always proud of the Irish flag — now it is just a symbol of hostility

Behind the flags there is more than racism. We need to debate this — and we need to do it honestly

Tricolours along the O'Brien Road in Carlow, from the Éire Óg roundabout to the Hacketstown roundabout. No-one has claimed responsibility for putting them up so it is not known why they were erected in the first place. Picture: Michael O'Rourke Photography

We drove over to my daughter’s house at the weekend, all excited because we were going to see two of our grandkids and two more were going to join us. She lives, let’s say, in the south inner city in Dublin, and by the time we got there I was completely down in the dumps, and actually angry.

Getting to her street involved several junctions, all governed by traffic lights. At every junction you could see Irish flags, big ones, hanging from poles. They’d been tied to the poles at what I’d call ladder height, and whatever way they had been tied there was no possibility of them fluttering or waving. They just hung there, bedraggled and miserable. Roughly ten per junction, and then one on every lamppost along the streets we were travelling. We must have passed 70 or 80 of them in a relatively small area.