You Can't Eat A Flag

Everything is about politics now.

Journalist - “Your father once said to you, You can’t eat a flag, what did he mean by that?”

John Hume: You see, what he meant by that was it was on the streets of the time elections were taking place, as they always did with both sides waving flags. And young people are getting all excited. And my father was standing watching this with me, and he tapped me on the shoulder, and he said, “Don’t you get involved in that stuff, son”. I say, “Why not, Dad?”. And he says, “You can’t eat a flag”. In other words, what he was saying is that real politics is about the living standards, about social and economic development. It’s not about waving flags at one another.”

In Northern Ireland and around the wider area of the border counties, they have a saying: If you stand in the middle of the road, you get knocked down. The poignant metaphor of three decades of sectarianism won’t be lost on students of Irish Politics. Similarly, this can be said of the trajectory of politics in the Republic of Ireland right now. Every single tangible act you engage in as you go about your mundane daily chores is political. Every tedious act is a declaration of allegiance, every meaningless gesture a referendum. Is the bus late? That’s the government’s fault or the opposition’s fault, probably the EU’s as well. You sip your coffee and taste ideology. Is it too bitter or too sweet? That's because the woke-looking barista with the Leo Varadkar tattoo and the barely visible nipple piercings is probably left-wing. The culture war coffee now tastes like poison. Has your beloved left you? The space beside you in bed is now just a negative shape, a hollow monument to the cold physics of abandonment. And you, poor wretch, leaning in to the septic glow of your screen, howling at the social media void where bots are your only real friends, digitally affirming your curious beliefs. That little blue rectangle has become your confessional, your moral battleground, the only witness to your magnificent ruin. You’re screaming about Ireland, aren’t you? A country that’s being torn apart by some spectral army of the genderless, the queer, the trans, the foreign, the far-right, the far left, the woke, choose your poison, a whole carnival of deviants marching in lockstep to install some ideological dilettante atop the crumbling 21st-century spire of Irish politics.