The National Colors of Ireland

New Zealand Tablet, Volume L, Issue 16, 26 April 1923, Page 21

The National Colors of Ireland

(By A. Hilliard Atteridge, in America ) Green has been the national color of Ireland since a comparatively recent date. Many people have the idea that tae green flag was thte banner of Ireland through most of her long history; and popular poetry and many productions of Irish illustrators of patriotic literature gave t ~r ssion - " omas M °° re bade K ™ When her kings with the standard of green unfurled Led the Red Branch knights to danger Ere the emerald gem of the western world Uas set in the crown of a stranger. I have seen elaborately colored pictures of Clontarf with the Irish warriors charging the Danes, led on by a green flag blazoned with a rising sun. and pictures of the old ngade at Fontenoy m green uniforms with a green standard waving over their ranks. So far as matter of fact history goes the poetry and the pictures are both misleading of There ls good reason to believe n the early a^es adorned with elaborately embroidered or painted devices belong to the later periods of history. Th earlier days flag’s Mere made simply by fixing a piece of colored stuff on "a spear or sewing together two of three strips of differently colored material. With many nations the battle flag «s a piece of plain red cloth or silk, square or cut into a swallow-tail pennon. Such was the o rifiamme of the del French monarchy and such, too, was the old Irish “sunburst”—a red battle flag. ~ Me are so accustomed to associate red with England that to most Irishmen it is a surprise to be told that flic iforms of the Irish Brigade in the French armies of the days before the Revolution were red. When the JDsh broke the English Guards at Fontenoy it was a ti-fit, of red. coats against red coats. In the old French”army ere were uniforms of many colors, the regiments of each province had their own special uniform showing the local colors. But all the foreign raised regiments, Swiss, German and Irish wore red. So the old Brigade was uniformed m red coats with various facings to distinguish the regiments, Only one regiment had green facings. Green did not become the national color for Irish flags until the end of the eighteenth century. It is sometimes said that before this date the national color of Ireland was blue. This is not quite correct. Blue was the ground color of the armorial devices adopted by the English sovereigns as “Lords of Ireland” up to the reign of Henry VIII. and “Kings of Ireland” after his assumption of the title. Until 1801, the year after the Act of Union, no heraldic device for Ireland appeared in the arms and on ' the royal standard of the English kings. But the heralds ho sought out for them a device or badge to express their claim to the lordship of Ireland selected at first the escutcheon of Munster, three golden crowns on a field or ground of blue. Henry VIII., perhaps fearing that the three crowns might suggest the triple crown of the Popes, changed this, and substituted for it the Irish harp, a harp of gold with silver strings in a blue ground. In 1801 this'was added to the Royal Arms of George 111. as “King of Great

Britian and Ireland” and has been so used ever since. It was in the closing years of the eighteenth century that green was adopted as their color by the United Irishmen. It was the badge of the new national movement, that under the repressive policy of the British Government soon became one of armed resistance. So green, the color of the shamrock, was a rebel badge. It was banned by authority and as the song of the time said of Ireland, while the new terror of armed coercion was at its worst! She’s the most distressful country That every yet was seen For they’re hanging men and women there For the wearing of the green. But while men were still living who had fought under the green flag in 1798, the color received recognition even from the British Government as the national color of Ireland and an Irish ensign was inventeda green flag with a small Union Jack in the upper dexter quarter— flag adapted from the red ensign of the British mercantile marine®? This officially designed flag was never popular in Ireland. Outside certain parts of Ulster, Irishmen preferred a plain green flag. Sometimes at national gatheiings it appeared adorned and even overloaded with various patriotic emblems, the rising sun, a round tower, a harper and a wolf hound, variously grouped together in defiance of the sound rule of flag-design that the device must be as simple as possible. For a fluttering flag can show combined colors plainly but not any elaborately detailed design. The best device used to be a green flag with a boldly designed yellow or golden “harp without a crown.” In North-eastern Ulster, in Belfast, Portadown and other strongholds of militant Orangeism, the men of the lodges marched on “the twelfth” under Orange flags. Orange is a color unknown to correct heraldry; the nearest thing to it in the heraldic scale of color is gold in escutcheons and its representative yellow in flags. Strange to say, this orange •color of Ulster Protestantism had its origin in medieval days as the device of a noble Catholic house that was a vassal of the Holy See, holding as a Papal fief a small principality in southern France near Avignon. The heads of this house were the lords of the town which the Romans called Arausio, a name that Frenchmen had softened into “Orange.” Early in the sixteenth century the male line ended in Philibert de Chalons, whose sister married a Count of Nassau in the Spanish Netherlands. Hence came the line of Nassau-Orange which gave rulers to Holland after its successful revolt. Orange thus became the national Dutch color, and in memory of the Dutch William, who became King of England and fought at the Boyne, Ulster Protestantism took Orange for its color. And now by a strange turn of events, orange, long the badge of the British garrison in Ulster, has become a part of the new national banner of Ireland. With a daring hope for the union of all Irishmen in the cause of Irish freedom the founders of the Sinn Fein movement chose for their banner a tricolor, green and white and orange, the emblem of a united, and free Ireland. “Uladh’s gold and Erin’s green With the white badge of peace between” to quote the words of an English poet priest, a life long friend of Ireland,. The new flag had its baptism of fire in the brief rising of Easter Week, 1916, and that heroic fight against desperate odds was its consecration. It was the flag of the long struggle against the Hamar Greenwood reign of terror, the battle colors of the I.R.A. But the colors are very often not quite those originally chosen. It is easier to get yellow than orange bunting and orange is still for many too closely associated with the horrors of Belfast, so the colors became a tricolor of green, white and yellow, a quite accidental combination of the Papal colors and the Irish, green. But the flag as correctly flown shows the hoped for’peace between the Orange and the Green, a presage of the united Ireland of coming years.