Debate contribution: Display of Flags and Emblems Bill: Second Stage
Debate contribution by Mr David Brooks on .
- MLA
- Mr David Brooks
- Party at the time
- Democratic Unionist Party
- 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 5739997
Read the official Assembly record
Text
I thank the Member for giving way. The Member talks easily about paramilitary flags and flags that are clearly offensive. The reality, however, is that the emails that we get from constituents are not always about paramilitary flags; they are about flags, including national flags, that are in more of a grey area. What is obvious from the Alliance Party is the sneering. Of course, we all want to break the hold that paramilitaries have over working-class communities. I am with you on that, but there is a degree of sneering about going to community workers and trying to get an agreement at a community level. I think that it was Nuala McAllister, a colleague of the Bill sponsor, who chided these Benches on a previous occasion and said that she got emails from members of her community about flags and worked with them to get them taken down, and she thought that we did not do that. Often, we are able to mediate and get flags brought down by talking to people in our communities, working with our communities and ensuring that we find reasonable accommodations. Sometimes, it does not work, but, at times, we can get the flags taken down. It might surprise Members on the Benches to my left, but colleagues have been approached by Members of their party to see if the likes of the DUP can be influential and talk to people to whom they cannot talk. Sometimes, we are chided for engaging with members of our community on the ground whom the Alliance Party sees as being beyond the kind of people that it wishes to deal with, but it is happy to ask other parties to do that because they have links in those communities, work in those communities and are able to have influence where the Alliance Party does not.
308 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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