Hi °C | Lo °C One of the things that struck me most about the debacle surrounding the British flag over Belfast City Hall is the absolute lack of respect loyalists and unionists have for the institutions and cultures they claim as their own.
News footage showed people massed outside the City Hall declaring how important the British flag and City Hall was to them.
Yet moments later they smashed their way into the building and attacked staff, the flag they claimed to love scrunched up around their faces, hanging upside down around their necks or crudely attached to poles which were used to attack police.
These people declared they were British, yet showed absolutely no respect for a democratic decision by a council subservient to the British Government.
Within the chamber the Democratic Unionist Party blasted Sinn Fein, the SDLP and the Alliance party for a democratic decision.
Unionist politicians now want to drag the Cenotaph into their squalid little territorial dispute.
If anyone were to treat the tricolour, the Easter Lily or the Garden of Remembrance with such disrespect I would be disgusted.
Brendan Blake
Castleblaney, Co Monaghan
