Easter Lily

The Easter Lily is a paper flower worn on Easter Sunday in remembrance of the 1916 Easter Rising. More than a commemorative badge, it makes republican memory visible on the body: a small, repeatable gesture through which a family’s inherited political cause enters public life. Its meaning shifts between ritual, risk, and political identification.

Form and Commemorative Use

The emblem’s colours were orange, white, and green. As a girl, Dolours Price wore one pinned to her chest with her best white frock and carried a basket of eggs on Easter Sunday. The observance commemorated a failed rebellion, but to a child it could feel like joining a secret league of outlaws. When a policeman approached, she covered the lily with her hand. The gesture captures the emblem’s double character: it belonged to a familiar annual ritual, yet displaying it could invite official attention.

Regulation and Family Inheritance

Commemoration in Northern Ireland was subject to the Flags and Emblems Act. The state’s suspicion of Irish nationalism reached the point that displaying the Republic’s tricolour could lead to imprisonment, while the Easter Lily itself was treated as a banned emblem. The Price family knew that restriction personally. Chrissie Price and three of her sisters served time in Armagh after being arrested for wearing paper lilies. Their experience placed a political symbol within the family’s longer history of republican activism and imprisonment, making the badge both an expression of belief and a reminder of its costs.

A Marker of Republican Division

After the IRA split, the lily acquired a further distinguishing use. The Official IRA were associated with commemorative Easter lilies attached to their shirts with adhesive; the Provisional IRA were identified with paper lilies fastened by a pin. A small difference in how the emblem was worn thus became a visible shorthand for a larger organizational rupture. In a movement where commemoration and political allegiance were closely bound, the lily could signify not only remembrance of the rebellion but also which republican tradition a wearer claimed.

Memory and Political Meaning

The book places the lily within a society where political memory was repeatedly performed and contested. Its annual observance taught Dolours to experience the cause as part of ordinary family life, while the law made that remembrance a matter of public conflict. Later, the book describes a peace-process-era politics in which disputes over the past and control of its interpretation remained unresolved. The lily’s significance lies in this compactness: a fragile paper object carries a history of ritual, prohibition, inherited commitment, and division.