Ireland will never be united so let the Union flag fly: Seamus Heaney wades in on the Belfast controversy

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Ireland's nobel laureate has criticised the decision by Belfast City Council to stop flying the union flag above city hall every day, a move which has led to eight weeks of violence and protests on the streets of the North.

In an interview with the Times newspaper in London, Seamus Heaney said that loyalists should be allow to fly the flag because it 'matters utterly to them'.

He added 'There’s never going to be a united Ireland, you know. So why don’t you let them fly the flag?'

Heaney questioned the motives of councillors to only raise the flag on designated days, saying there was 'no hurry' and that Sinn Féin 'could have taken it easy' on addressing any issue with emblems.

'It’s very dangerous indeed,' he said. 'Somebody made this remark, and it made me alert to a new possibility – they said if this goes on until the marching season, everything is, in a sense, lost.'

Councillors from the Sinn Féin and Alliance parties voted in early December to only fly the flag above the historic building on 15 designated dates each year, as happens at Stormont. 

Belfast city hall with Union flag in place  Image: Wikimedia Commons

Heaney said the move has led loyalists to 'perceive themselves as almost deserted.' 

'And right enough', he added, 'I think Sinn Féin could have taken it easy. No hurry on flags. What does it matter?'

'Loyalism, or unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland it operates not as a class system, but a caste system. And they [the loyalists] have an entitlement factor running: the flag is part of it.'

Heaney grew up in Castledawson and Bellaghy in Co Derry, one of nine children in a nationalist family. Despite his criticism of the move by Belfast councillors, he conceded that it would be difficult for them to reverse the flag decision once it was in place:

'There’s no way they’re going to go back on it, of course. As someone who knows something of prejudice, from early on, I can understand the loyalists.'