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.

A flag is a piece of coloured cloth, and we are the animals who’d like to think we’d die for it. This is the fundamental, idiotic truth of our species, a truth we’ve now fed into the great digestive tract of the internet, where it has been regurgitated as a new kind of gospel. We have entered the age of the flag as policy: not a thing you die for, but a thing you post on social media for. A liturgy for the damned, broadcast from the little glowing coffin of your phone. This is how your nation-state, that wheezing cadaver you bemoan, becomes corporeal again. It doesn’t need your taxes or your bloodied corpse in a trench; it needs your profile picture, your retweet, your fervent little share as you earnestly froth at the mouth. Social media didn’t invent toxic patriotism; it just discovered how to liquefy it into mainstream discourse, the politically sacrilegious directly into the social media addict’s veins. The flag is no longer a symbol; it’s a pathogen. It blooms in the digital petri dish, a fungus of synthetic belonging, sprouting heroic flag montages set to throbbing trad music and a billion little emoji banners fluttering in the silent, scrolled-through night. Every avatar is a tiny mass grave, waiting for its bodies.

We’ve been here before with flags. For thirty years, the tricolour was not a symbol of a nation but a shroud for the unquiet dead. Sinn Féin performed its grim liturgies, folding the green, white, and orange over boxes of splintered wood and ruptured meat. They were draping the idea of Ireland itself over sectarian murderers, over sexual predators, over the hapless bombers who fumbled their own explosive ordnances and were suddenly, vaporously absolved of all sin. The flag embraced, too, the more competent architects of carnage, the ones who turned crowded streets into abattoirs, and their souls into calcified embers.

This was a long, slow séance, a theft conducted not in shadow but in the grim theatre of the funeral cortege. Throughout the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Féin, were not just a political movement; they were occult engineers, trying to illicit a sympathetic magic in the guise of the tricolour. Through a creeping, insidious innuendo—a glance, a mural, a graveside oration—and the brute, undeniable fact of the bullet and the bomb, they purloined the flag from the living. They didn’t just wave it; they bound it, stitch by bloody stitch, to the act of murder. The contagion spread; the semtex-laden symbolism drifted out from the hills of South Armagh to the bloodied pubs of Guildford and Birmingham, until the very fabric seemed to smell not of wool and dye, but of cordite and burning flesh. They made a nation’s banner a battle-standard of the terrorists’ grave, and with grim irony, they ignored the orange symbolism of the tricolour.

There’s an equally insidious flag-themed choreography ongoing now. Political strategists, those eunuchs of the soul that operate in this environment, have realised that to plant a flag in a timeline is to draw a border around reality itself. “Show your colours,” the command goes out, and thousands of hands twitch, obediently wrapping themselves in the digital shroud. This is the new policy: not written on parchment, but etched into the nervous system by the ceaseless, dopamine-drenched haptics of the share. Who needs a secret police when you have a symbology this sticky, this virulent?

How long can a country endure when its borders dissolve into hashtags and its people become rival clans of flag-wavers, frantically signifying nationhood one post at a time? Longer than you think, perhaps—there’s always fresh friction to mine. Each iteration of the flag, each algorithmic blast of patriotism, is shadowed by a paranoia: if you’re not waving the flag, are you still real? A new kind of border emerges, not at the edge of the map but in the gaps between pixels, the negative space where those who don’t wave flags, the mainstream media, and the morally suspect reside.

There was a time when work meant something. When your value could be seen in the heft of a wall you built, or in the fact that your scalpel didn’t slip and kill somebody, or—if nothing else—in the simple, physical dignity of knowing how to boil water and extract from it something drinkable. Now we live in the afterbirth of the internet civilisation, where work has become an apparition, a hallucination, and the highest expression of labour is the Social Media Influencer, a professional cyber-phantom searching for meaning in the comments section of Instagram.

Ask one of them what they do and they will spill a liturgy of nonsense syllables: morketing, engagement, optimisation, reach. These are not words; they are the low groans of a dying civilisation doom-scrolling for products you don’t really need. You’d probably have to take a loan out from the credit Union to afford them. All it signifies is this: they are paid to promote into the digital void, to shout in the abyss and call it a brand identity, to play at being the unsuspecting voice of a multinational conglomerate, as if Procter & Gamble is a single wounded soul sitting somewhere, waiting to be adored. They call themselves “digital natives,” which is a polite way of saying “addicts,” children raised by screens who think that doom-scrolling TikTok and X at three in the morning is one of the sacraments. They talk about leveraging micro-influencers, which means paying a pustular teenager with neon hair and a ring through its gender neutral nose to hold up a can of beer in front of a bathroom mirror and mime a song. This is the future of labour: the adolescent selfie elevated into a ritual of capital, the new Eucharist for our hollow digital gods.

And yet for all this, their power is constrained and limited. Their profession is chained to the capricious moods of tech titans: Zuckerberg, Musk, the Chinese government-run TikTok, nefarious demiurges of the digital age. At any moment, the algorithm might shift, and the entire priesthood of brand whisperers is reduced to irrelevance. Their once shining strategy becomes dead code, their memes rot in the feeds where nobody looks, and the influencer is left to contemplate the futility of their existence, as pointless, as doomed, and as unedifying whoring for likes and shares.

Google and Meta have banned paid political advertising on their platforms. Their justification is sanctimoniously pious, as always. Transparency, they say. An end to manipulation. A public sphere washed clean of the pulsing menace of propaganda. But what does a ban ever achieve except to banish the thing from visibility? Politics has always thrived in the shadows. If you tell political parties and people like me that the official advertising avenue is closed, that the public agora is out of bounds, we will simply move sideways, into the cracks and undergrowth—money funnelled through “independent” think tanks, influencer campaigns rebranded as lifestyle content, anonymous whispers passed along the détourned machinery of social media memes. You’ll only be able to trust what side the influencers are on and what subliminal messages they send by making sure they have the right flag on their profile. Your kind of people.

So here is the EU congratulating itself on cleansing the digital public square of paid-for political advertising, while the real campaigns have already migrated into WhatsApp groups and messaging channels like Telegram. You may be protected from seeing political ads in your feed, but you are not protected from their influence. Banning online political advertising won’t abolish influence; it will only drive it underground, making it more poisonous, harder to track, and harder to resist. Already, political operatives have deployed campaign strategies beyond paid political ads on social media platforms in the Irish Presidential election. They’re everywhere, and most people don’t even realise that they’re watching political advertising because the social media account you worship has the flag you’ve nailed your colours to. There’s a word for that.

In the end, flag-waving is a perfect policy for a broke, distracted, and deeply lazy social media age. Who writes this policy? No one and everyone. It is an edict with no signature, a law with no author; the clearest sign yet that Irish politics now belongs to the mob, and the mob belongs to no one. These “fly the flag” initiatives present themselves as a grassroots effusion of spirit, but this is the oldest trick in the book. Political social media spontaneity is the most carefully manufactured algorithmic product; it requires no courage, no sacrifice, and no thought. Just a nimble thumb and a willingness to reduce the complex, messy, glorious project of a nation-building to a single, fluttering, digital icon. It’s patriotism for people who find standing for the national anthem too much of a cardio workout. You think this Irish Presidential election is bad? Future Irish elections are going to be much worse.

We are left groping for ethics, the media howls for “balance,” as if one could negotiate with the flag-waving zombies. Social media platforms like to tinker with their content moderation policies, a futile attempt to exorcise a demon they created and continue to nurture while asking you to agree to their terms of service agreements that they fail to moderate anyway. The critics plead for a more “inclusive” civic space, a pathetic notion when the very architecture of the space is engineered for flag-waving sectarian combat. The era of what we knew as “retail politics” is over. We’re now in the era of “social media suicide” politics. You’ll give all for your candidate on social media, or you will die trying.

P.S. I love you………

In the past 2 weeks, I’ve received 2,342 direct messages across Facebook, X, Instagram and LinkedIn. (I counted). Not to mention the replies on those platforms to what I have posted. On X alone, I’ve had 8.1k replies to posts that have received over 5 million impressions. Those numbers don’t correlate, so there are probably bots involved.

I usually try to reply to as many good-faith DMS as possible. The one thing it has taught me is you can’t please everyone. Even the most polite can be intransigent and sometimes abusive, and it’s not worth it. So I’m retreating from social media and it’s frothing at the mouth imbecilites. From now on, I’ll post my thoughts or hand grenades and walk away. I shall no longer be engaging with replies or DMs or whoring for likes and shares. Hypocrisy is a grave sin. If you’re looking for me, I’ll probably be weeping for Cork’s Hurlers, Munster’s losses, or why can’t Cork City FC compete with Dublin teams. My email is available for subscribers, who have been incredibly encouraging, kind and sometimes incredulous at my tone. The Irish Politics Newsletter now has over 6,500 subscribers, and it’s very humbling and rewarding that people take the time to read what I write. That's why I do it.

I first started writing in 2008 with a blog that found an audience, won award nominations, and produced a bestselling book. My style remains the same, as those in the know will tell you, but its context has shifted. The irreverent tone that I used to write in was a niche interest in the 2010s, when I stepped away; it is now in vogue and relevant again. Engaging in the current social media psychosis is not worth it anymore. I’ll keep writing until people stop reading. I won’t engage with social media, but I shall try to reply to as many emails as possible.

Kind regards,

P.