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Ireland: Green Flag

by Vincent Morley

History of the flag
The Green Flag in the Boer War

See also:

Ireland
Naval Service flags
Flags of the colonial period
Flag of the San Patricio Battalion, Irish Volunteers in the Mexican-American war

History of the flag

by Vincent Morley

The Society of United Irishmen, a republican movement which emerged in the 1790s, used a gold harp on a green field (the 'Green Flag'). This flag was carried in the rebellions of 1798 and 1803 and it quickly achieved popular acceptance as the national flag. The flag was used during the widespread peaceful agitations for 'Repeal' of the act of union in the 1830s and 1840s but was viewed as a seditious emblem by the British authorities. In 1848 the Repeal movement split and the radical wing (known as 'Young Ireland') adopted both republican ideas and a tricolour inspired by that of the second French republic. The Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 was quite a small affair and the tricolour flag was largely forgotten until the twentieth century. The next revolutionary movement, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (or 'Fenians') of the 1860s, was much more formidable and it reverted to using the Green Flag. That flag was also used by all the nationalist politicians who campaigned for 'Home Rule' (devolved government within the United Kingdom). By about 1880 or so the Green Flag had become officially tolerated to the extent that one was no longer likely to be arrested for displaying it, but it never had any official status and was always seen as a nationalist emblem.

Vincent Morley, 19 December 1996

The Green Flag was extensively used during the campaign for repeal of the Act of Union which Daniel O'Connell led during the 1830s and 1840s - the flag is invariably shown in illustrations of the mass meetings convened by O'Connell during that period and it is probable that it was in continuous use from 1798 onwards. Both the Green Flag and the tricolour were used by the insurgents in 1916, but in the period after the rebellion the republican separatists in Sinn Féin tended to use the tricolour while their rivals in the Irish Parliamentary Party (which advocated 'Home Rule' for Ireland within the United Kingdom) used the Green Flag exclusively. The alternative national flags thus became the flags of competing political parties until the general election of December 1918 when Sinn Féin's landslide victory finally relegated the Green Flag to a secondary role.

Vincent Morley, 8 January 1997

Before independence Irish athletes had to compete as part of the British team, but an episode which occurred in 1906 may be of interest. I quote from G.A. Hayes McCoy (1979), 'A History of Irish Flags from Earliest Times', p. 182:

"In 1906 when Peter O'Connor won the long jump championship at the Olympic Games in Athens, he successfully objected to the raising of the union flag ... in honour of his victory and succeeded in