TRICOLOUR

“The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally…”

[Excerpt from The Proclamation of the Irish Republic read out by P.H. Pearse at noon on Monday 24 April 1916 on the steps of the GPO, Dublin, the tricolour having just been raised]

~~~

Green is for gangrene
that eats up all the heroes
whose deaths went unseen

White’s for their faces
from the shock they’d receive
were they to return

Gold’s for the lucre
twenty million fold thirty
pieces of silver

***

Green’s for the gombeens
who sell out their own people
not paying their taxes

White’s their amnesia
when asked to explain where
all the cash came from

Yellow the public
who vote in these criminals
and show them respect

***

Green are the gobshites
who honour these criminals
and lap up their lies

White for surrender:
truth and fairness replaced with
greed, ugliness, spite

Gold is for Mammon
god of builders and bankers
and knaves in the Dail

***

Green was the landscape
now blighted with motorways
speeding to nowhere

White’s for the death throes
of culture and heritage
bulldozed and buried

Orange vested men
toil for the vested interests
of millionaire thieves

***

Green the Republic
that betrays its ideals for
the good of the few

White’s for its failure
to nurture all its children
in justice and love

Yellow the bishops
hiding paedophile curates
and priests from the law

***

Green’s for the struggle
against tyranny and hate
so the story goes

White its purity?
Social justice me bollix -
it’s jobs for the boys!

Yellow the cowards
who plant bombs killing children -
some fucking heroes!

***

Orange the bigots
who refuse to accept that
they started the war.

~~~

10 April 2008
on the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement

Tricolor by Patrick Stack is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.amethystdragonarchives.org.