Debate contribution: Display of Flags and Emblems Bill: Second Stage

Debate contribution by Mr Jonathan Buckley on 7 September 2026.

MLA

Mr Jonathan Buckley

Party at the time

Democratic Unionist Party

Date

7 September 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Display of Flags and Emblems Bill: Second Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5670663

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I thank the Member for her thoughtful intervention. I will say clearly — it is perhaps an issue that Mr Burrows mentioned in his intervention — that there is a legitimate question about what the police are doing, especially when we talk about the flags of proscribed organisations and how they impact on local communities. That is a question and a debate that I am open to having. The Member is right, and I have seen them cause issues in my constituency. Where I disagree with the Member is on the subjective nature of the Bill. She used words about things being imposed against the interests of a given community, but that is a particular individual's view and is not necessarily the view of the entire community. What we are doing through this potential legislation and, indeed, an online portal is manufacturing that grievance. There should be community resolution. There should be a focus on dialogue between the residents of a particular area. That is the best way to solve a lot of the issues.

I will come back in a moment. Let us be real. This gets to the nub of my issue, folks. In today's world, when we have so many issues and the Department for Infrastructure cannot meaningfully fix the potholes in our roads or unblock the gully on a lay-by, are we asking to give it responsibility for deciding which flags should be removed? Have we learnt nothing? The legislation is a recipe for disaster. We have roads across Northern Ireland that are crying out for investment. We have potholes that motorists are hitting every day. The Alliance Party is keen to talk about its inbox being full of emails on flags. You could times it by 25, 30 or maybe even 100 to get the number of complaints that Members receive about the condition of our roads, yet Alliance's priority is to say, "Let us burden DFI with another complex and divisive issue. Let us divert its resources and energy away from what it should be doing and put it into an issue surrounding flags". We have roadsides covered in weeds; graffiti that is left on street signs; infrastructure that needs to be maintained, repaired and upgraded; a waste water system that is under immense pressure; and a Minister who is in the courts over the A5 road fiasco and Irish signage at Grand Central station, yet the solution from the Alliance Party appears to be, "Let us give DFI another job, create even more time-consuming bureaucracy, give officials another set of complaints to process and then, when a flag is deemed to have breached the new framework, send departmental staff out to remove it, potentially requiring PSNI assistance where there is a risk of confrontation". Folks, if the Department cannot get around to spraying the weeds along our roadsides, what confidence should anybody realistically have in its ability to police thousands of flags and emblems across Northern Ireland? I have no doubt that, during my tenure as Chair of the Infrastructure Committee, the Minister and I will cross swords on many occasions. I want to be clear, however: I do not want to be at the Dispatch Box debating which flags should fly and which should not from a DFI perspective. I want to be talking about road investment, waste water systems and how we can make this place thrive for all of its citizens, not the issue of flags. I argue that it is simply unfair to mandate departmental staff with the issue, which — let us be frank — politicians have been unable to deal with. I will hazard a guess that it certainly will not be dealt with by DFI. Let us create even more time-consuming bureaucracy. If the Department really wants to deal with the issues that are the people's priorities, why should we not enable it to do so at every opportunity? Remember this: every minute and every pound that is spent administering this scheme is a minute and a pound that cannot be spent on the Department's existing responsibilities. Welcome to the la-la land fantasy of Alliance politics. It is government by unelected quangos and officials, ultimately at a cost to Joe Public. It is important to note that there is no proper financial impact assessment associated with the proposed legislation; indeed, the costs are effectively unquantifiable. Members, if you want a recent example of the explosive cost of policing flags in the way desired by Paula Bradshaw and the Alliance Party, look no further than Birmingham City Council, which recently spent in the region of £2·6 million removing Union flags and England flags. Members, I think that we can all agree that Birmingham is no Belfast. The issues that we have with traditional flag-flying and the tradition of emblems are a far cry from the issue on which Birmingham has just spent £2·6 million. I do not think that anybody could realistically justify to the taxpayer and the paying public that that is a good way to spend DFI money. Roads are falling apart, and waste water infrastructure is in a dire state. We have a planning system that is unable to connect houses and unable to promote businesses and connect new businesses to the grid. The needs are endless, yet the Bill is where the Alliance Party wants to prioritise the spending of public money. How naive to believe that introducing such divisive legislation will not result in spiralling, uncontrollable costs to the taxpayer. We do not even know the scale of the supposed problem that the legislation is intended to address. That is remarkable, given that it is the basis on which the Member proposes to implement an entirely new regulatory regime. There is another issue that deserves attention. The Bill appears to give considerable weight to the views of complainants. We are told that members of the public will be able to report flags and emblems through an online portal and provide their views. What stops that portal becoming a grievance factory? What stops that portal being manipulated by certain actors and certain communities to place pressure on and create a certain perception in the Department for Infrastructure, which the Member wants to adjudicate on the decision? How will we ensure that the Department is not influenced through a portal? It is for the birds to suggest otherwise.

I will indeed, Mr O'Toole.

I am glad to see that the Member's outreach to unionism is going well for him, because that is certainly not reflected in many of his fighting diatribes in the Chamber. I do not know whether the Member was in for the start of the debate; I cannot recall. I think that he was here for most of it but maybe not all. I referred to current legislation and acknowledged the problem with paramilitary flags. I acknowledged that there are occasions when flags are flown that cause offence. I was at pains to say that there is an inability to enforce such existing law, never mind creating new law. That is factual. Mr O'Toole knows that fact. I will continue. What happens when two neighbours have completely different views on the same flag? What happens when one person sees a symbol of cultural identity while another sees something offensive? What happens, by means of the Bill, when the Department has to decide between two competing interpretations?

Are we really to believe that civil servants sitting in offices in Belfast are to decide whether a flag that is flying on a street in Portadown, Ballymena, Londonderry or Newry is sufficiently offensive to warrant its removal? That is what the Bill entails. That is a recipe for inconsistency, resentment and accusations of political interference, which DFI simply does not need.

Where are the safeguards? Where is the independent appeals mechanism? Where is the guarantee that one community's cultural expression will not be treated differently from that of another? The Bill does not adequately answer those questions. What confidence can any member of the public have in the ability of a civil servant to interpret different flags and emblems when the Member who is introducing the Bill does not even appear to know the difference between a paramilitary flag and a Linfield flag?

The Member who is the sponsor of the Bill released a video that described a Linfield flag — a football flag — as an offensive flag. We are, in some way, to believe that we can trust civil servants to get this sensitive topic right, when a lady, the sponsor of the Bill, who proclaimed that she had been working on it for 10 years, could not even differentiate between a paramilitary flag and a Linfield flag.

I will give way to the Member on that point.

1,466 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 16:13 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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