War of the flags

William Montgomery looks at the flag culture in Northern Ireland visiting Belfast and Londonderry and stopping along the way

Transcript

00:00So, I've just walked onto Donegal Road, and almost immediately there's something here,

00:07which looks very much like it's been burnt out.

00:13As you can see, there's of course an Israeli flag over there,

00:19a very, very common feature of these loyalist neighbourhoods.

00:25Let me give you a bit of context.

00:28I travelled to Northern Ireland following the summer riots in the UK

00:32to find out if the loyalists and nationalists were uniting against immigration.

00:38During the summer riots and protests, we saw many pictures of people

00:41from both the loyalist and nationalist communities

00:44on the streets of Belfast united against immigration.

00:48Are the two sides uniting against this issue?

00:51No, I don't think that they are, but there are some people in nationalist Ireland

00:57and some people within unionism who probably are beginning to find common cause in those things.

01:03Simple answer is they're not uniting.

01:06But one thing did catch my eye.

01:09So what you see with the Palestinian conflict and the Israeli conflict

01:14is irreconcilably different views over that conflict that are transposed here.

01:21So you have Irish nationalists who are overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian

01:27and unionists who are pretty solidly, insofar as they think about it, sympathetic to Israel.

01:33And that issue is so intractable in the Middle East

01:39that there's no meeting of minds over that here.

01:42To find out more about what's going on, I travelled to Derry

01:46to meet with local expert and senior journalist, William Allen.

01:52I think that pretty much there's always been links between Republican groups,

01:57the IRA and so on, and Palestine.

01:59But I think nationalists in Northern Ireland tend to be more left-wing.

02:04And there is an upswell of support for Palestine.

02:08You'll see some large protests and demonstrations here in Derry at the minute

02:13whenever something particularly bad happens during the conflict in Gaza.

02:19You'll see Israeli flags flying in loyalist areas,

02:24and Palestinian flags flying in nationalist Republican areas.

02:29And I think that's just another outplay of Northern Ireland,

02:33that we will find a way of having an opposite point of view

02:38to the other section of the community.

02:40I think many of us in Britain forget that Northern Ireland remains very extreme.

02:45As a result of long-lasting division, any opinion or issue is usually amplified

02:51in this part of the world. Recent example being immigration.

02:55The UN is urging Stormont, the Northern Irish devolved government,

03:00to clamp down on hate-motivated violence, which remains epidemic here.

03:05The two main religious and political communities pick sides.

03:11And the war in the Middle East is no exception.