Flags used to so dominate Northern Ireland politics that, before the Troubles, the Northern Ireland Labour Party used to say that "if you put a Union Jack on the back of a donkey it would get elected."
That may now be changing. John Hume liked to recall how his father told him at election time: "Son, you can't eat a flag," urging the future SDLP leader to vote on bread and butter issues.
"You can't eat a flag" became such a hackneyed phrase people made jokes about it. "You can't stop people round here trying, John", came the reply at one SDLP function.
Others quipped that flags tasted pretty good in an orange sauce or with a shamrock garnish. But perhaps indigestion is at last setting in.
A watershed may have come during the recent Assembly election count in Fermanagh and South Tyrone when Tom Elliott, the Ulster Unionist leader, flew off the handle after seeing a group of Sinn Féin supporters brandishing tricolours. It happened when he was giving his acceptance speech after being elected as one of the area's six MLAs.
"I see many people here today with flags, many of them flags of a foreign nation," said Elliott. Cue cheering from unionists and jeering from the republicans.
Sensing trouble, Michelle Gildernew, one of three Sinn Féin MLAs elected in the constituency, tried to dampen things down but it was too late.
"I would expect nothing better from the scum of Sinn Féin," Elliott roared from the podium amid a rising chorus of catcalls and cheers. "Their counterparts in the IRA have murdered our citizens." In the past, it would have been an unremarkable incident.
Indeed, if you went back to 1987, the Shinners could have been fined £500 (€570) each under the Flags and Emblems Act for displaying the tricolour in a way that was likely to cause offence.
This time it played differently. Although the audience of unionists in Omagh leisure centre was happy enough, there was widespread condemnation and chaos within the UUP generally. Elliott, a Fermanagh farmer, floundered as he tried to extricate himself. He talked of his deep respect for the Irish flag and of his dislike of political flag-waving of any kind before coming right out with it and saying sorry. "I will certainly apologise to all those good nationalists, republicans, even Sinn Féin voters who felt offended by it," he said in an interview to be broadcast on today's BBC 's Politics Show, but leaked last week.
There was a qualification, however. "For those people who do not regret the murders they may have carried out in the past, I have to say that if they come to regret what they have done, then I think we could move forward much quicker."
Like many Northern Ireland tales, this one has a back story. In the forefront of the flag wavers was Sean Lynch, a victorious Sinn Féin MLA who had just knocked out the last remaining SDLP seat in the area. He was, as the election literature noted, an "ex POW", or prisoner of war.
Lynch was once an IRA activist who was much feared and detested by the local Protestant community, not least by part-time soldiers like Elliott. Lynch had been shot and wounded by the SAS as he approached an 800lb landmine intended for a security force patrol. He was wearing combat dress and carrying an automatic rifle at 4.30am on April 26, 1986. His commanding officer, Seamus McElwaine, who was with him, was shot dead. He later said they were checking the bomb.
An inquest found that McElwaine was killed unlawfully, having been given no chance to surrender, and shot dead five minutes after he had been wounded. Lynch claimed his friend and commander had been shot after being questioned.
This is the deep history and emotion behind the seemingly chance outburst at the count centre. It is a measure of the distance Northern Ireland has travelled that people did not line up on either side and that no politician, except Jim Allister of the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice, came out in support of Elliott's comments.
The DUP has been largely silent, perhaps remembering the history of such incidents.
Ian Paisley got his original political lift-off in rows over flags in 1954. Paisley was then an obscure rabble-rouser, not the kindly peacemaker and friend of Martin McGuinness he has since become.
He became aware that Billy McMillan, a republican candidate, was displaying a small tricolour alongside a starry plough in a disused shop he was using as his election headquarters. It was in Divis Street in the nationalist Lower Falls area, so the RUC left it alone judging that, even under the Flags and Emblems Act, it was unlikely to offend anyone. The window was so dirty and so small it was hard to see anyway. But Paisley was nonetheless offended.
He called for Protestants to rally in central Belfast and march into the area to remove the offending emblem themselves if the police would not act. The RUC moved in and days of rioting and bus-burning followed. The flag was replaced and the police, led by Frank Lagan, a senior Catholic officer who later became famous for his opposition to the use of the Paras on Bloody Sunday, smashed the shop window to remove it again. More rioting, the worst in 20 years, followed and this time it spread to areas in Tyrone, Fermanagh and Derry. The IRA, which was starting its border campaign, became involved.
Gerry Adams, who was caught up in the rioting, later said that it led to him joining Sinn Féin. It was also a recruiting tool for the IRA. It was one of the nails in the political coffin of Terence O"Neill, the reforming unionist prime minister, who condemned Paisley as "brainless" and was later toppled by the firebrand preacher.
Flags could also be inflammatory south of the border. On Victory in Europe Day (May 8, 1945) at the end of the second world war, Charles Haughey, a future taoiseach, was among a group of UCD students who burnt a Union Jack on Dublin's College Green. They had been reacting to some slight offered to the Irish flag by Trinity students and gardai had to be called to quell the unrest.
The reaction to Elliott's outburst seems to show that those days, when flags could spark such trouble and stir such emotion, are now behind us. However, there may be one last twist to come.
Following the recent local government elections, unionists have lost their majority on Belfast city council. The middle-of-the-road Alliance Party now holds the balance of power between nationalism and unionism, led by the resurgent Sinn Féin and DUP respectively.
The Union Jack flies regularly over the City Hall, against Sinn Féin demands that it either be removed or accompanied by the Irish flag as a sign of parity of esteem. Years of work and an expensive "equality impact assessment" have failed to resolve the issue by agreement. Now it will almost inevitably come to a vote and Alliance, which tries to avoid controversy on such issues, will be put on the spot. Probably it will be resolved by restricting the flying of the flag to official occasions, but that is unlikely to satisfy either Sinn Féin or the unionists.
Nobody expects a rerun of the Divis Street riots of the 1950s but, in its own way, it could be nasty enough.
