Meta-Musings: Belfast's Flags Protests

I am in the midst of essay writing and therefore am going to keep it short this week. The essay I am writing discusses the flag protests that continue to rumble on in Belfast and whether they can be understood as cultural performance.

While researching the protests, mostly via on line articles I am struck by the images, in a way that I have not been before. Beyond a masking of identity the protesters have, through wearing the flags, turned themselves into living symbols, erasing their own individual identities.

via BreakingNews.ie

Image via Belfast Telegraph

Protest outside the Alliance Party office in East Belfast belonging to Naomi Long, following the decision by Belfast City Council to stop flying the union flag every day. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Tuesday December 4, 2012. See PA story ULSTER Flag. Photo credit should read: Paul Faith/PA Wire via Belfast Telegraph

Loyalists demonstrators clash with police during rioting in Belfast during a protest about flag flying restrictions via Daily Mail

Cathal McNaughton/Reuters via The Christian Science Monitor

The other thing which has really caught my eye is the images of life-as-usual against the images of violence. They really capture how 'normalised' disturbances form the backdrop to everyday lives. Simon Hoggart wrote in the Guardian:

I was fascinated to see that in Belfast some parents are taking their children, a few still in prams, to watch the riots over flying the union flag. It's as if the events are part of the great tapestry of their history. In the same way, people took their infants, now in their 60s, to see the last coronation, so they could in turn tell their grandchildren that they were there.

It all underlines for me that protest is as much an expression of cultural identity in Northern Ireland as anything else and should be understood as such. While I would never expect politicians to condone such violence, I worry that very few of them have stopped to really ask why it is happening.