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

Debate contribution by Ms Claire Sugden on 22 September 2026.

MLA

Ms Claire Sugden

Party at the time

Independent

Date

22 September 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Display of Flags and Emblems Bill: Second Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5739509

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I begin by acknowledging the work that the Member has put into bringing the Bill before the House. That is important, because I do not want my concerns about the Bill to be interpreted as suggesting that there is not a problem here; there absolutely is. Flags should not be used to intimidate people, to mark territory or to tell someone that they are not welcome in a place where they live. There is no legitimate cultural defence for the display of the flag of a proscribed organisation, nor should any of us be comfortable with flags being erected anonymously, left indefinitely and eventually hanging in tatters from public property. At the same time, legitimate cultural expression is legitimate cultural expression. The respectful display of a national flag or an emblem associated with cultural celebration or commemoration is not equivalent to intimidation or paramilitarism. Shared space should not have to be culturally empty space either. The difficulty is working out where the lines sit in practice, and I have considerable sympathy for the Member, because she is trying to do something that, frankly, government should have done a long time ago. We have talked about the issue for years. We established the Commission on Flags, Identity, Culture and Tradition, and its final report was published in 2021, yet, here we are, five years later, still debating who is responsible when flags are attached to public property, what powers exist, who should exercise them and what happens when nobody is prepared to act. That is a failure of government, so I genuinely commend the Member for what she is trying to do: fill a vacuum that continues to cause distress across communities in Northern Ireland. I know what it is like to bring forward a private Member's Bill on an area on which government has not acted. You do so because, if a private Member's Bill does not try to move something forward, nothing happens at all. However, there are realistic expectations of what a private Member's Bill can do, and I am increasingly concerned that we are coming up against those exact limitations with this Bill. I have listened to the contributions over the last number of days and weeks, and I am quite sympathetic to a lot of what has been said. The central question for me is not whether something needs to be done — it absolutely does — but whether the Bill creates the right architecture to do that, and I am not convinced that it does. With a private Member's Bill, scope is entirely limited, and the scope that is needed to address the issue needs to be much broader, which, again, is why I am sympathetic to the Member, because it is government that needs to be doing that. As others have said, the obvious issue is about responsibility, and the Bill places responsibility primarily with the Department for Infrastructure. I appreciate that there is a practical logic to that, in that what we are talking about is attached to street furniture, much of which belongs to DFI, but the decisions that the Bill asks officials to make are not really infrastructure decisions. If something creates a road safety hazard, that absolutely is an infrastructure issue, but deciding whether a particular flag is intimidatory, threatening, offensive, abusive, insulting or antagonistic —

556 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 16:27 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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