Every Day Is Special: April 22 - Flag Day in Ireland

April 22 - Flag Day in Ireland

(Easter Monday)

Posted on April 22, 2019

I don't normally associate Easter with armed uprisings - nor with flags - but that association was made for Ireland in 1916.

The "Easter Rising" is the name for the Irish rebellion that occurred on April 24 of that year. That year Easter fell on April 23, so the uprising fell on Easter Monday. The rebels were attempting to end British rule and to create an independent Irish Republic, and they carried the tricolor flag that Ireland uses today.

A couple of years before this uprising, the British government had declared war on Germany and joined in World War I. Irish separatists knew that it's harder for a nation to fight two different wars in two different regions at one time, so they began to plan an uprising.

However, the uprising was not successful. Some sixty Irish rebels were killed, and their 16 leaders were executed. About 140 British soldiers were killed - but the saddest statistic is that around 260 civilians were killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thousands were injured - and for what?

Actually, the fact that Britain so brutally repressed the uprising, leaving parts of the capital city of Dublin in ruins, probably led to an even greater desire for independence among Irish people.

And so this uprising helped create the conditions for the War of Independence (1919 - 1921), and that war eventually led to the 1921 partitioning of Ireland into Northern Ireland, which even now remains joined with Britain in the United Kingdom, and the rest of Ireland, which became the Republic of Ireland.

Now, about that flag...

Colors on flags are often symbolic of something, and in the case of the Irish flag, there is a very nice symbolic meaning: peace between different people. Green represents Irish Catholics (and I suppose St. Patrick) and orange represents Irish Protestants (because Protestants of the late 16th Century supported William of Orange, a Dutch prince who became King of England). The white between the Catholic/green and Protestant/orange of course symbolizes peace.

Unfortunately, there has not always been peace between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, especially in Northern Ireland. Lots of senseless violence and lots of loss...even families who didn't lose anyone in the various bombings and riots and attacks suffered from the stress of what might be seen as terrorism or might be seen as an ongoing low-level war.