Fifty Years On by Malachi O'Doherty

Author:Malachi O'Doherty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Loyal Rebels

Jamie Bryson sees himself as a champion of loyalist cultural rights. He is a short, trim and argumentative young man with an apparently bottomless appetite for contention. He was noticed by the media when he led protests in Belfast in 2012 against the decision by Belfast City Council not to fly the Union Flag from its dome every day of the year. Instead, the council would now synchronise with the custom in the rest of the UK and fly on ‘designated days’, eighteen of them, royal family birthdays and other anniversaries.

Jamie might have seen himself as bereft of an argument if the flag was to go up and down the pole in time with the one over Buckingham Palace. He might have considered that his right to Britishness was no more compromised by the decision than the Queen’s was by the custom in London.

But he took protesters on to the streets to argue that their culture was being violated and that this was part of the steady erosion of Britishness in Northern Ireland, going back to the capitulation he saw in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

Nationalists, by contrast, wanted to see less of the manifest Britishness of Northern Ireland and more representations of its Irishness. A shift like that would, however, inevitably offend the British protestant who revered the monarchy and wanted to express loyalty to that imperial tradition. So we had a few weeks of street protests and several arrests mostly of young people. We saw ardent housewives and teenagers on television news expressing the hurt they felt at the insulting removal of the flag.

We also saw, through social media, a huge amount of derision aimed back at the loyalists and their ‘flegs’; their working-class accents mocked. And there was a Twitter campaign to urge people to ignore the protests and to go out into the city and the bars and carry on as if peace and good order prevailed.

The protests stopped but Jamie continued to campaign on Twitter and on radio and television. The media liked him. He was young and brash and good-looking, for what that’s worth. The loyalist spokespeople of the past had often been older, fatter men with moustaches; surly and humourless. Jamie could even laugh at himself. Once he rushed to Twitter to protest against Irish rugby supporters flaunting an image of a balaclava, in apparent support of the IRA:

So during an evening of anti-British hate & abuse from Republic of Ireland supporters, they also unveil a banner of a masked terrorist. This is the country Theresa May wants to de-facto rule over N.Ireland.

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