Flags & Culture.....

[lawnseed]

Flags have never made me feel uncomfortable. Would a street full of Tricolours make you uncomfortable?? Tourist wouldn't have a clue

true

[MW]

Sorry, but no matter how much I walk around it, poke it and squint at it, I can't make any sense of a suggested connection between Northern loyalism or protestantism or unionism or Rangerism on the one hand and Israel or Zionism or Judaism on the other. Can anyone help?

Is it just that the flag is in the Rangers colours, much as you see Japanese and American Confederate flags on the terraces when Cork are playing?

A large number of Protestants, including a fair contingent of DUP members notably Minister Nelson McCausland, consider the Ulster Protestants to be a lost tribe of Isrealites.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/26/northern-ireland-ulster-museum-creationism

Large number of Protestants my bangle. It's a tiny, tiny minority of crackpots.

[Hoof Hearted]

This is july 1st. Just blink and ignore everything for the next 31 days (inclusive). Mad Month has arrived. Unless it affects me and and my family, in a physical way, not verbal, it wouldnt cost me a thought if i went to magherafelt in the morning and it was wall to wall union jacks !|

[Tony Baloney]

Trying to link loyalism to rational thought is futile.

[laoislad]

Could be worse lads,there are all Dublin flags around the place where I live so just remember there is always someone worse off than yourself.

[Newbridge Exile]

Home truths for lovers of our wee country. Actually, I thought someone had hacked into Kevin Myers account and wrote the piece below.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/loyalist-bigotry-did-not-arise-just-when-the-ira-came-along-16017902.html

It was good of the UVF thugs of east Belfast to give me a cue with which to follow my column about nationalism last week (which, as it happens I had started before the unprovoked attack on the Short Strand).

For we should be clear about this: the culture of the Billy Boy tribal bigot predates the emergence of nationalism as a powerful force among the Catholic working classes of Belfast and Glasgow.

Paradoxically, the rabble-rousing leaders of these drunken louts have usually been teetotal clergymen, such as Roaring Hanna and Ian Paisley.

The compulsory Sunday closing of pubs was once a primary element of their identity — provided that their own drinking clubs were allowed to remain open.

Logic is never the strong point of any strongly-held tribal identity, but particularly so for these people, who have remained locked in a historical enigma wherein they are 'British', although living in Ireland, and generally lawless, though they 'loyally' support the Crown, and sober in their general political aspiration, though usually enough drunk at the time.

They have a church, too. In their illiterate and incoherent scheme of things, Calvary is probably a collective for horses and maybe Gethsemane is something mysterious that happens in a sperm-bank. No, their real religion is Rangers Football Club.

Glasgow Rangers is the sporting icon for loyalist bigots. The club's own words are irreproachably neutral.

It is law-abiding. It is patriotically British. Its outward message is of harmony and ecumenism. But to the large thug element amongst the Rangers fans, the key to their identity is almost like the Third Secret of Fatima. It is this: no Fenians here.

There is a congenial, indeed government-backed myth, in both Scotland and in Ireland, that 'one side is bad as another': that Sinn Fein/IRA are pretty much the same as the UDA/UVF.

This is simply untrue. There is no republican equivalent to the Romper Rooms of the UDA, wherein men were routinely beaten to a pulp by loyalist thugs and from which both the term and the practice became celebrated.

And then there was Lenny Murphy and his merry gang, the Shankill Butchers, who for years in the mid-1970s abducted, tortured and murdered Catholics — usually by cutting their victims' throats.

This culture did not emerge simply as a response to IRA violence.

It was there already. It was feckless, violent, drunken, lost, lumpen proletarians for whom a perverted tribal identity conjoined with a godlessly Calvinist sense of superiority, even as they stewed in their ghettoes of suffocating illiteracy and economic failure.

But they were, nonetheless, elevated by the insane delusion that they are the chosen people, who have been deprived of their birthright by some vast conspiracy between the Catholic Church and the British government.

This psychiatric condition affects almost an entire under-caste, thereby placing their minds and aspirations almost beyond ordinary analysis.

Last Sunday, it was 45 years since their hero, Gusty Spence, murdered the teenage barman Peter Ward and seriously wounded William Doyle in the Malvern Street shootings.

Thus the Troubles got under way. Nineteen years later, the Catholic barrister who had defended Spence at his trial — also called William Doyle — was shot dead by the IRA for the hideous crime of being a judge. And so it goes.

Now we know: these Troubles of ours haven't gone away, you know. And they're at it again in east Belfast, with a lost tribe of illiterate, paranoid barbarians wandering the bleak landscape of their own brutal imaginations, about no purpose that any one of them could possibly explain.

Except they probably know this is a period of rather enjoyable violence, before the much-loved Orange marches — plus riots, with luck — can begin.

And next comes Rangers' first match of the season, to be followed by a night of paralytic alcoholism and rounded off, no doubt, with a complete short-term memory lapse. (This is called 'culture', by the way.)

For once, let history be our guide. Our political classes must not be swayed by the violence of these cretins.

It's very suprising (to me anyway)that Kevin Myers wrote this article as there's a lot.of sense in what he say's

[MW]

Sorry, but no matter how much I walk around it, poke it and squint at it, I can't make any sense of a suggested connection between Northern loyalism or protestantism or unionism or Rangerism on the one hand and Israel or Zionism or Judaism on the other. Can anyone help?

Is it just that the flag is in the Rangers colours, much as you see Japanese and American Confederate flags on the terraces when Cork are playing?

A large number of Protestants, including a fair contingent of DUP members notably Minister Nelson McCausland, consider the Ulster Protestants to be a lost tribe of Isrealites.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/26/northern-ireland-ulster-museum-creationism

Large number of Protestants my bangle. It's a tiny, tiny minority of crackpots.

Most do.

You, Mr hardstation, are delusional and hilarious. You've invented hundreds of thousands of fantasy Protestants to suit your own wierd opinions!

In my three decades as a member of the Protestant community I've never even met anyone who espoused "lost tribe of Israel" views.

[mayogodhelpus@gmail.com]

In the Occupied Territories the Primrose and Blue flies over the symbols of Free State Opression like the Garda Station and the Public Library but thankfully all other Freemen of Mayo fly the Green and Red over Ballaghadereen.

FREE BALLAGHADEREEN.

[AFS]

All flegs, everywhere, should be banned.

Anthems too.

Pile of shite.

[Bogball XV]

Sorry, but no matter how much I walk around it, poke it and squint at it, I can't make any sense of a suggested connection between Northern loyalism or protestantism or unionism or Rangerism on the one hand and Israel or Zionism or Judaism on the other. Can anyone help?

Is it just that the flag is in the Rangers colours, much as you see Japanese and American Confederate flags on the terraces when Cork are playing?

A large number of Protestants, including a fair contingent of DUP members notably Minister Nelson McCausland, consider the Ulster Protestants to be a lost tribe of Isrealites.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/26/northern-ireland-ulster-museum-creationism

I would also have thought that "they" attach themselves to the Israeli/South African Apartheid states, similar to the way Nationalists/Republicans would have with the PLO/ANC.

Yeah, I thought it was just that since the PLO and PIRA were 'allies' in that they trained together in Libya (according to the Tom Clancy book I read anyway), then the loyalists decided to ally up with Israel.  Although of course there are similarities between pre-troubles NI and the likes of Israel and the old South Africa.
It could be that the lost tribe thing adds to the perceived connection too though.

Heres me thought that Willie McCrea wrote that one.

Willie was credited as political adviser on the book.

[Maguire01]

Sorry, but no matter how much I walk around it, poke it and squint at it, I can't make any sense of a suggested connection between Northern loyalism or protestantism or unionism or Rangerism on the one hand and Israel or Zionism or Judaism on the other. Can anyone help?

Is it just that the flag is in the Rangers colours, much as you see Japanese and American Confederate flags on the terraces when Cork are playing?

A large number of Protestants, including a fair contingent of DUP members notably Minister Nelson McCausland, consider the Ulster Protestants to be a lost tribe of Isrealites.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/26/northern-ireland-ulster-museum-creationism

Large number of Protestants my bangle. It's a tiny, tiny minority of crackpots.

Most do.

You, Mr hardstation, are delusional and hilarious. You've invented hundreds of thousands of fantasy Protestants to suit your own wierd opinions!

In my three decades as a member of the Protestant community I've never even met anyone who espoused "lost tribe of Israel" views.

In my three decades as a Fenian, every Protestant I have ever met has espoused such views.

Yes, but you've only met one Protestant.

[Fear ón Srath Bán]

In Lurgan here at the moment the big Protestant COI church down the Fenian end of the town has not 1, 2 or even 3, but 4!!! union jacks flying out of the spire. Could you imagine the hue and cry if the Catholics hoisted up the Tricolour?

Good old 'Christian' triumphalism -- antagonise thy neighbour, as thou might be antagonised by their very (antagonistic) existence.

Know now how the muslims might have felt under the hooves of the advancing crusades.

[Orior]

I went for a cycle yesterday through Ballyclare, Doagh and Parkgate. Nice part of the country but spolied by the red white and blue regalia (not to mention the UDA and UVF flags)

[isourboydownyet]

Could be worse lads,there are all Dublin flags around the place where I live so just remember there is always someone worse off than yourself.

sure the dubs flags are usually down by the end of july or early august,the jacks are normally up until september!

[Bogball XV]

Could be worse lads,there are all Dublin flags around the place where I live so just remember there is always someone worse off than yourself.

sure the dubs flags are usually down by the end of july or early august,the jacks are normally up until september!

Bad choice of words Ourboy, LL's interpretaton of the term 'jacks' is different from yours.

LL in nordie speak, 'jack' may refer to the Union Flag as flown by the UK.

isourboydownyet in mexican, 'jack' may refer to a dub, 'jackeen' is a boord dub.