Opinion

Time for equal recognition of nationalist cultural identity

As the north’s only Seanadóir, Niall Ó Donnghaile is facing a formidable task of bringing the Seanad to the people of the north and the people of the north to the Seanad. Picture by Philip Walsh 
As the north’s only Seanadóir, Niall Ó Donnghaile is facing a formidable task of bringing the Seanad to the people of the north and the people of the north to the Seanad. Picture by Philip Walsh  As the north’s only Seanadóir, Niall Ó Donnghaile is facing a formidable task of bringing the Seanad to the people of the north and the people of the north to the Seanad. Picture by Philip Walsh 

I SLOWLY realised as I looked at the Irish tricolour fluttering in a warm gentle breeze over the Oireachtas (Irish houses of parliament) that this was the first time in my 61 years of life that I thought about being in a building over which the national flag of Ireland was flying legally.

I was observing the flag through the office window of Seanadóir Niall Ó Donnghaile, recently appointed to the Seanad, with six other Seanadórí following Sinn Féin’s remarkable breakthrough in the election when 23 TDs were elected.

As I watched the flag, Niall was busying himself arranging ‘bits and pieces’ to make his office more ‘homely’.

A bi-lingual place name, ‘An Tra Gearr’ – the Short Strand’, rooted his Dublin office in his natural home district of Belfast which is also my instinctive home, having lived there for many years.

He placed a photo of his father Paddy and brothers Sean and Padraig and himself beside a photo of Bobby Sands on his office wall chart.

Niall is half my age so this is also his first time in a working environment where the national flag flies legally.

The more I thought about the legal status of Ireland’s national flag the more I realised that what I was dealing with there and then was my sense of being stateless; living like tens of thousands of northern nationalists in a society which has yet to legally recognise us as Irish citizens in our own country by legally accepting our cultural identity and symbols like the tricolour.

Since partition northern nationalists have invested their personal authority and pride in the national flag and that was an important act of resistance and claim to nationhood.

With the many other acts of resistance – armed and political – it kept alive the struggle for a united Ireland.

Due to the peace process, the Good Friday Agreement and the many, many positive changes, the north is a wholly different place to what it once was.

It is time for the cultural identity of northern nationalists to be legally recognised and accepted on an equal basis to that of unionists.

As the north’s only Seanadóir, Niall Ó Donnghaile is facing a formidable task of bringing the Seanad to the people of the north and the people of the north to the Seanad.

But he will ably assisted in his task by the other Seanadóirí, the 23 TDs and Gerry Adams, who has the overall responsibility for national political initiatives in the Dáil.

But he has been well-chosen, groomed and prepared in his short thirty-one years of life to carry a ‘Uniting Ireland – north/south integration’ portfolio under his youthful arm.

I know Niall’s parents, Ann and Paddy, well. They belong to that special 1960s generation of republicans out of which the modern IRA and Sinn Féin came.

Both are former political prisoners. Niall’s extended maternal and paternal family can trace their republican politics to partition.

They educated their children through the Irish medium sector at a time of sparse resources, when door-to-door collections were the funding norm.

Today Niall is liofa (fluent) in both Irish and English.

His time spent on the streets of his Short Strand/ Ballymacarrett community over many years, protecting it from attack by loyalists; his two terms as a Belfast city councillor and his year as mayor of Belfast – a demanding job indeed – and one in which he excelled, will give him the depth and breadth of experience required for the national political stage.

His immediate focus is to steer a bill through the Seanad in tandem with a proposal from Gerry Adams in the Dáil to change the south’s constitution to allow people from the north to vote in presidential elections. A much-needed and much sought after desire by northern nationalists.

He is also keen to assist relatives seeking a resolution of the legacy issue and will lend his support to the completion of the Narrow Water Bridge; the high-speed rail between Belfast and Dublin and to challenge the informal Irish government and Fianna Fáil coalition over their austerity measures and assist further development of national politics through the many organisations out there already doing so.

I look forward to the day when sitting in an MLA's office at the assembly I can look out the window and see an Irish tricolour legally flying over Stormont alongside the Union flag.