The tricolour of the Republic of Ireland symbolises a unified island
Posted in Flags, Historical articles on Monday, 13 May 2013
This edited article about Ireland originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 252 published on 12 November 1966.
The national flag of the Republic of Ireland has broad vertical stripes of green, white and orange. This is more strange than it might seem at first sight, for the Irish Republic is predominantly Roman Catholic, and orange is recognised in Ireland as the traditional colour of militant Protestantism.
Green is the colour usually associated with the Emerald Isle and, in fact, a banner that used to be the national flag is wholly in green except for a golden harp, another symbol of Ireland, displayed on it.
Green is the colour of old Ireland and the Catholic Irish: orange is the symbol of later arrivals, the Irish Protestants. In particular, orange commemorates Holland’s William, Prince of Orange who, as England’s King William III, was the leader of Protestant Europe against Catholic France and her King, Louis XIV.
William was flying his orange banner the day his soldiers defeated Catholic James II in Ireland in 1690 at the Battle of the Boyne. James hoped to use Ireland as a base from which to recover the crown of England which he had abdicated two years before in the face of William’s invasion of England.
The white band on the tricolour, between the green and the orange, is the symbol of brotherhood. So the three colours together express the hope for a united Ireland.
The flag seems to have first appeared in the early 1840s and was almost certainly influenced by the French tricolour – the flag of the Great Revolution. Irish sympathisers, looking forward to their own freedom, adapted the French revolutionary banner and, sometimes it seems, even flew them side by side.
Taking the form of the French flag in acknowledgment of common aims, the Irish substituted their own colours for the French red and blue.
The tricolour flew in the Easter Rising of 1916 and it is now the proud emblem of a free nation.