deliriouslove1970. The life & times of Gary and Denise Flanders. (Free and worth every penny. If you would like to compliment the editor, send to garytheflan@deliriouslove1970.com. If you would like to complain, call your mother.)

The Starry Plough banner (Irish: An Camchéachta – the bent plough) is a flag which was originally used by the Irish Citizen Army, a socialist Irish republican movement, in 1914, and subsequently adopted by other Irish political organisations.

The concept may have originated with George William Russell, for the Irish Citizen Army and showed silver stars on a green background. The flag depicts an asterism (an identifiable part of a constellation) of the constellation Ursa Major, called The Plough (or “Starry Plough”) in Ireland and Britain, the Big Dipper in North America, and various other names worldwide.

James Connolly, co-founder of the Irish Citizen Army with Jack White and James Larkin, said the significance of the banner was that a free Ireland would control its own destiny from the plough to the stars.^[4] The sword as the coulter is also a biblical reference in Isaiah 2:3-4. In the Bible verse, God pushes his followers to turn their weapons into tools, turning the means for war into the means for peace. The marriage of Catholictradition, the biblical reference being integral to the flag’s design, with socialist concepts, like the working class and the oppressor forcing them to take up their ploughshares as arms, leaves the Starry Plough flag with complex and nuanced implications that are susceptible to a wide range of interpretations.

The original Starry Plough was unveiled on 5 April 1914 and flown over the Imperial Hotel by the Irish Citizen Army during the 1916 Easter Rising. The 1916 flag is on display at the National Museum, Collins Barracks, in Dublin.

The Starry Plough banner (flag) was originally designed to represent the people of Ireland (Northern Ireland) who thought and fought for Ireland as a separate country free from English control. The older banner featuring the plough is still occasionally used today by the Irish Republican Socialist Party, Sinn Féin, the Workers’ Party (formerly known as Official Sinn Féin), and many other socialist republican parties.

A a visitor to Northern Ireland, I get it.