Flags and Emblems Act

The Flags and Emblems Act is presented as a means of regulating public commemoration in Northern Ireland, where nationalist symbols carried legal as well as political risks. Its force is clearest in the childhood ritual of Dolours Price: wearing an Easter Lily to remember the 1916 Easter Rising, she learned to cover it with her hand when a police officer approached. The law made a small badge a matter of public authority, and commemoration a practice shaped by the expectation of being watched.

Legal and Political Setting

The account describes commemorative rituals as strictly regulated under the Flags and Emblems Act, against a background of pronounced official fear of Irish nationalism. A person could go to jail in the North simply for displaying the tricolour flag of the Republic of Ireland. The evidence does not detail the Act’s provisions or explain how particular cases were enforced; it establishes instead the threat attached to nationalist display and the climate in which the law operated.

That climate gave symbols an unusually charged place in ordinary life. Following partition, the Price family called the place where they lived the North of Ireland rather than Northern Ireland. Even the choice of a place-name could signal political allegiance. The Act’s regulation of commemoration belonged to this wider setting, in which public expression was entangled with disputes over national identity and sovereignty.

The Easter Lily and Everyday Concealment

As a girl, Dolours dressed in her best white frock on Easter Sunday and carried a basket of eggs, with an Easter Lily pinned to her chest. The flower commemorated the failed rebellion, but for her it also made political memory tangible: wearing it felt like joining a secret league of outlaws. When she saw a policeman, she covered the badge with her hand. The gesture captures the pressure of the law without requiring a confrontation or arrest; a child learned to anticipate scrutiny and conceal the sign before an officer could challenge it.

The ritual connected private conviction to public visibility. The badge’s meaning depended on being worn where others could see it, while the risk of displaying it taught Dolours to hide it. In that tension, commemoration was not simply remembrance of a past rising. It was also a recurring act in the present, performed under the possibility of punishment.

Symbols and Community Boundaries

The social divisions surrounding the Act were reinforced in daily life as well as through formal regulation. During the 1950s, mixed relationships between Catholics and Protestants remained unusual partly because communities lived in separate neighbourhoods, attended different schools, and worked and socialised in different places. Jean McConville crossed these boundaries when she worked in the home of Arthur McConville’s mother and later married Arthur. His mother resented the relationship, and one of Jean’s uncles, a member of the Orange Order, beat her for the transgression. This episode does not establish an action taken under the Act; it shows how religious and political boundaries could also be enforced within families and communities.

By the late 1960s, public space made those boundaries more visible. Orange Order marches began outside the McConvilles’ door, while Ian Paisley urged Protestants to expel Catholic neighbours. During the 1969 riots, barricades formalised the separation between neighbourhoods; they were later replaced by peace walls. In this setting, flags and commemorative emblems were not neutral decorations. They marked identities and claims to place in a city increasingly divided by sectarian conflict.

Continuing Disputes over Display

The political significance of public symbols persisted long after the height of the Troubles. Nearly two decades after the Good Friday Agreement, peace walls still divided Belfast neighbourhoods, and nationalist and unionist flags remained visible markers of communal affiliation. More than 90 per cent of children in Northern Ireland continued to attend segregated primary schools, while some bus stops were informally treated as belonging to one community or the other. These conditions show that the symbolic divisions in which the Act had operated outlasted the moment of childhood concealment.

In 2012, Belfast City Council voted to limit the number of days the Union Jack could be raised above City Hall. Protesters attempted to storm the building, and riots followed, with unionist demonstrators throwing bricks and petrol bombs. Multiparty talks on unresolved peace-process issues also foundered in part over flags. The account does not identify these later disputes as proceedings under the Flags and Emblems Act; rather, they reveal the continuing political charge of deciding which symbols may appear, where, and on what terms. The Act’s significance therefore lies both in its direct regulation of commemoration and in the broader conflict over public display that remained unresolved.