By Sylvie Kleinman
In February 2023, locals assembled in Ballyfermot People’s Park ‘amongst a sea of flags from around the world’ to counter the racism and xenophobia fuelling ongoing anti-immigration protests. Lord Mayor Caroline Conroy would not ‘have other people’ say that the Irish were ‘racists’ or ‘haters’. Their flags projected international solidarity. Coincidentally, the Irish tricolour was being advertised on Dublin’s buses by the Thomas Francis Meagher Foundation (TFMF). This year marks 175 years since he had ‘first’ flown the ‘tricolour’ from the Wolfe Tone Confederate Club at 33 The Mall, Waterford, on 7
March 1848. The TFMF promotes ‘pride in and respect for the Irish flag and the understanding of its symbolism and meaning for peace’. This clashes with an instantly visible feature of the mediatised or live-streamed anti-immigration and far-right protests: the waving and wearing by protesters of large tricolours, and also the green Erin go Bragh flag, Connolly’s ‘sacred emblem of Ireland’s unconquered soul’. This year, 2023, also marks the bicentenary of Meagher’s birth, the 225th anniversary of 1798 and half a century of European Union membership, prompting some reflections.
In 1796, as Tone was negotiating with French decision-makers concerning the expedition to Ireland, he proposed ‘an Irish corps, in green jackets, with green feathers’. They would carry a ‘green standard with the Harp’, on top of which would be ‘the Cap of Liberty’ (and no longer an English crown). I have looked extensively but unsuccessfully in various French archives for a sketch that Tone was asked to make, but this Irish flag lived on in instructions to his general, Hoche. He was advised to have some made, with branches of shamrock under the harp. This combination of colour and symbols instantly resonates. After the French landed, Bishop Stock recorded that they had hoisted above his gate a ‘green flag’ with the slogan ‘ERIN GO BRAGH’, or ‘Ireland forever’. The Revd Little noted its ‘Harp without a Crown’. After Tone was made prisoner on 3 November, Under-Secretary Edward Cooke in Dublin Castle was assured that he would be sent a ‘green flag’ with an uncrowned harp taken on board the Hoche, on which Tone had sailed. Cooke was collecting ‘French curiosities’ imported ‘by them for the revolution of this country’, and each French ship carried one. Another dispatch referred to ‘the flag of Erin’ and, though none has ever been found, it seems that these proto-national Irish flags had indeed been made in France.
The second French revolution of July 1830 reinstated the French tricolour, officially adopted in 1794 but banned under the Bourbon restoration. The Belgian revolution, independence and Belgium’s own tricolour swiftly followed. These events were applauded in Ireland. In December, now campaigning to repeal the Union, Daniel O’Connell was welcomed back from London by a ‘triumphal’ procession, described in elaborate detail in the press. The ‘prevailing colours, orange, green and white’, in rosettes, cockades and banners ‘presented a scene unrivalled in Dublin’. O’Connell concluded this ‘great national demonstration’ by kissing his medal of the Order of Liberators, telling the immense crowd that he now wore it from a ribbon ‘half green and half orange (cheers)’, because only ‘the united voice of Ireland’ could repeal the Union. The Irish national colours were fixed, inspired by France and Belgium.
In the much-diluted, hagiographical and widely disseminated Meagher monomyth, no source is ever given for that week-long inaugural display of ‘the tricolour’ in Waterford, but the press was at the time overflowing with the broader context of Irish patriotic fervour ignited by the third French revolution of February 1848. The Irish Confederation’s repeal agitation intensified, and Meagher was a leading member of its National Council—not, as the TFMF claims, ‘the leader of the Young Irelanders’. Meetings and gatherings fused repeal with congratulations to France, as Old and Young Ireland vowed to reconcile. The Nation (4 March 1848) reprinted calls to weave ‘tricolour scarfs’ on Irish looms, because ‘The colour of Ireland is green; of united Ireland green and orange’. An Irish tricolour flew on Vinegar Hill, but on 12 March the Limerick Sarsfield Confederate Club was illuminated and ‘the tricolour flag of France’ waved proudly from its window. Possibly too in Waterford, where the 24-year-old Meagher was bravely accepting his defeat in a recent by-election. Both he and William Smith O’Brien spoke at a Dublin meeting to finalise an address to the French and were charged with sedition. Meagher had spoken rousingly of a future ambassador of an Irish republic at St James’s Palace but not of an Irish tricolour. Bailed pending their trial, they travelled with a ‘deputation of the Irish Confederation’ that included Edward Hollywood, Martin MacDermott, Richard O’Gorman Jr and Eugene O’Reilly, meeting Lamartine (head of the provisional government) in Paris on 3 April. Their contact was John Patrick Leonard (1814–89), member of the Garde Nationale and correspondent of the Cork Examiner and The Nation, who had led an earlier delegation of the Paris United Irish Club. The British ambassador had ‘amicably’ asked about the ‘Irish flag’ that they had added to a glorious heap of tricolours: it was still the green one.
Extensive press coverage always highlighted Smith O’Brien (an MP) as the leading member of the delegation. At a ‘welcome back’ event in Dublin on 15 April, he was presented with an old Volunteer flag from 1782. Then Meagher spoke of mingling in Parisian crowds ‘round the trees of liberty’, and presented ‘a flag which we have conveyed from France’ [emphasis added]; it was mounted on a pike. He then uttered its now-iconic (but truncated) description:
‘The white in the centre signifies a lasting truce between the “Orange” and the “Green” and I trust that beneath its folds the hands of the Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants may be clasped in generous and heroic brotherhood’.
It ends here (strategically?) in today’s versions, but according to the contemporary press the young firebrand then conjured up an ancient martial symbol: ‘If this flag be destined to fan the flames of war, let England behold once more, upon the white centre, the RED HAND that struck her down from the hills of Ulster (loud and continued cheering)’. John Mitchel that day also praised ‘this magnificent Irish tri-colour’. With French colleagues, we have never traced the French ladies who supposedly manufactured this tricolour for Ireland, which Meagher had possibly financed. On 8 April, however, The Nation had already reprinted a most insightful letter from one ‘Catherine’, suggesting that ladies of Dublin prepare a ‘tricolour national flag—green, orange and white—the emblem of our present unity and future independence’. The vision was growing, and not only through Meagher.
Elevating him, Brian Boru-like, today as the sole ‘father’ of the tricolour belies the mature and objective approach to reconstructing the past perfected during the Decade of Centenaries. And Meagher emerges as a gracious team player in the sources. In 1798 green had become the signifier of uniting the people of Ireland in the sovereign and slowly secularising nation envisioned; after the Union, orange only alluded to loyalist and ultra-loyalist Protestants. The simplistic relabelling of green as Catholic in opposition to orange does not replace the vision of ’98, and perpetuates a now-obsolete definition of Irishness. It is not in the narrative of the tricolour’s first landmark outing, in 1916. Along with other flags, it flew atop rebel forts, audaciously and tactically. The leaders had indeed followed the laws of war, or rather the 1907 Hague Convention, to the letter. They fulfilled all conditions for ‘belligerents’, including having ‘a fixed distinctive emblem recognisable at a distance’. The first Easter commemoration in 1917 was hampered by strict conditions, which is why Madeleine ffrench-Mullen wrapped a tricolour around herself under her coat. A first? Constance Markievicz’s homecoming in June 1917 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzRzx-IbAlE) was filmed and immediately released in cinemas: even in black and white, the vigorously waved tricolour is triumphant.
Flags are now a widely available and affordable ready-to-grab prop—fun and festive, but also appearing to legitimise dubious so-called ‘citizens’ actions’. As we write, some of these have been followed by acts of wanton criminal destruction.
Sylvie Kleinman is Visiting Research Fellow, Dept of Modern History, Trinity College Dublin.