The Great Awakening? The Belfast Flag Protests and Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist Counter-memory in Northern Ireland

Abstract

This article examines the protest movement that surfaced as a result of the decision taken by Belfast City Council to remove the Union flag from Belfast City Hall in December 2012. This article examines why the issue conflagrated as it did and led to a mobilisation within working-class Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist (PUL) communities on the issue. Examining the flag protests within the context of more general PUL disaffection with the Good Friday Agreement and its associated peace process, this article looks at the flag protests as an avenue for disaffected PUL communities to assert a new counter-memory that challenges not only the 'other' but also those within the leadership of political Unionism who are said to have used PUL communities during the conflict only to abandon them in the post-conflict transition. This article concludes by examining the future potential of the new political movement born out of the flag protests and the avenues open to it to challenge the hegemonic position of traditional Unionism that has left PUL communities behind as Northern Ireland progresses in transition out of political conflict.

Three-faced: The conflicting roles of citizenship education in conflict-affected societies – A comparison of Northern Ireland and Israel

“…At the time of data collection, the local government decision to remove the British flag from Belfast City Hall came up in the discussions. This decision had prompted significant disturbance and street protests by members of the Unionist/Loyalist communities who believed that it represented an erosion of their British identity (Hearty, 2015). The views expressed by students in the Protestant school echoed these sentiments and for some, it represented the disproportionate and somewhat delegitimised position of ‘Catholics’:Jacob: It’s politics like- Stormont that like make like all these decisions that- basically nobody likes.…”

Introduction – Twenty-Five Years on And the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement: Some Critical Reflections

“…Abandonment and exploitation claims from the Protestant, Unionist, Loyalist (PUL) community have intensified since the B/GFA. The flag controversary heightened divisions in the PUL community between political Unionism and working class PUL community members' complete rejection of these political elites (Hearty 2015). There are tensions, therefore, between those who adhere to a more contemporary and more moderate Loyalism that is connected to retaining and re-energizing culture, and more adversarial and anti-Republican forms of Loyalism that are embedded in historical legacies and traditions (Long 2018).…”

All aboard Belfast’s ‘brandwagon’: from ‘pariah city’ to ‘energised city’

“…In April 2019, the killing of journalist Lyra McKee 10 disgusted the public mood so much that it forced political leaders to enter discussions aimed at re-opening Northern Ireland's political institutions that had lay inactive for 36 months 11 . Then there are concerns over 'culturicide' within Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist (PUL) communities (Hearty, 2015). In late 2012 to early 2013, this came to the surface during the flag protest 12 that led to months of sporadic 'riotous exchanges' on the streets of Belfast before spreading to other parts of the country (Halliday & Ferguson, 2016;Knox, 2016).…”