THE Union Flag flew over Belfast City Hall on Sunday to mark a Royal birthday after peaceful flag-related protests at the weekend.
After weeks of sporadic rioting, east Belfast community leaders came together last week to call for an end to disturbances, while reserving judgment on peaceful protests.
Chief Constable Matt Baggott has said some 4,000 people had been involved in protests across Northern Ireland during a so-called ‘Operation Standstill’ by protestors two Fridays ago, with reports of only a dozen involved in actual rioting by comparison.
Yesterday the flag was hoisted for the second time since city councillors voted to restrict the number of days it can be raised to 18.
The flag was raised to mark the 48th birthday of the Earl of Wessex’s wife, Sophie, Countess of Wessex.
There had been a very heavy police presence from east Belfast to the city centre as hundreds of protestors made their way to a peaceful demonstration at City Hall.
Police in east Belfast last night said they had charged an 18-year-old man with disorderly behaviour and a 20-year-old man with disorderly behaviour and provocative conduct connected with the protests.
They are both due to appear at Belfast Magistrates’ Court today.
The charges are understood to relate to arrests following disorder in the Albertbridge Road area on Saturday. A 15-year-old boy was also arrested but later released unconditionally.
Last week loyalist paramilitary chiefs in east Belfast, community leaders and clergy called for an end to the violence, which has dogged parts of Northern Ireland since December 3.
More than 100 police officers have been injured in the trouble.
The Chief Constable and the head of the Police Federation have said that senior individual members of the UVF in east Belfast had been involved in orchestrating some of the violence in recent weeks, something which has been disputed by the paramilitaries, some local unionist politicians and some clergy in east Belfast.
Speaking on Twitter after Saturday’s peaceful protest, a former senior Catholic PSNI officer said that it “seems the violence around the protests can be switched on and off – suggests it was organised rather than spontaneous”.
In response, former Sunday Times correspondent Chris Ryder alluded to claims that the violence was a pretext for more public funding.
“As somebody we both know said: it was a giant grant application,” he said.
However, East Belfast PUP councillor John Kyle hit back at them both.
“It is easy to be cynical, it is much more difficult to address underlying inequalities,” he said.
Likewise, director of the East Belfast Mission Mark Houston, who was one of those supporting the call by paramilitaries and community leaders to end the violence, hit back that this was “way too lazy a critique”.
He said that “there is far more to this than the narrowness of comment re UVF”.
Meanwhile, Alliance minister Stephen Farry has said that First Minister Peter Robinson was wrong to dismiss an Alliance proposal for regulating the displays of flags and symbols in “shared public spaces”, something the DUP leader said would be unworkable.
Mr Farry said: “It is not only disappointing but deeply concerning that Peter Robinson cannot see the need to better address the misuse of national and other flags on public property and within shared space.”
Mr Farry said that “of course” his party supported the right to fly legal flags from private property but said that “all public areas within Northern Ireland belong to all the people of Northern Ireland and should be treated as shared space – this includes the communal areas within housing estates and the public highways”.
He added: “Frequently, many parts of Northern Ireland are marked through the proliferation of flags on lampposts – claimed by one part of the community but excluding another.
“They remain up over long periods of time, eventually turning into rags. These flags are used to mark out territory and often perceived as intimidation.”