Flag of Ireland

How to read it

Article 7 of the Constitution of Ireland (1937) says: “The national flag is the tricolour of green, white and orange.” It says nothing more. The details are in the guidelines of the Department of the Taoiseach, which has general responsibility for the flag: the flag is twice as wide as it is high, the three colours are of equal size, and the green goes next to the staff. The guidelines give the colours as Pantone 347 (green) and Pantone 151 (orange). They are advisory, as there are no statutory requirements. The tricolour was flown over the General Post Office in the Easter Rising of 1916, adopted as the flag of the Irish Free State in 1922, and confirmed as the national flag by the Constitution in 1937.

Also searched as: flag of ireland, green white and orange flag, ireland flag, ireland flag meaning, irish flag, irish flag meaning.

What flag is green, white and orange?

Ireland’s, with the green next to the pole. Côte d’Ivoire’s flag has the same three colours in vertical bands of equal size, and its constitution lists them the other way round: orange, white and green.

Ireland’s and Italy’s flags side by side

Italy’s flag has green and white in the same places, but its third band is red: its constitution describes “green, white and red, in three vertical bands of equal size”. Ireland’s third band is orange, and the Irish guidelines say flags with yellow or gold in place of orange are a misrepresentation that should be actively discouraged, because the substitution destroys the flag’s symbolism.

Green, white and orange

The guidelines explain the colours through history. An older nationalist flag, green with a harp, goes back at least to the 1640s. The Orange Order, exclusively Protestant, was founded in 1795 in memory of King William of Orange. A mid-19th-century generation of nationalists hoped to make peace between the two.

Meagher, the Young Ireland leader, flew a tricolour from 33 The Mall in Waterford on 7 March 1848, and in April presented one brought from Paris to a meeting in Dublin, saying the white “signifies a lasting truce between Orange and Green” and hoping that beneath it Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics might be “clasped in generous and heroic brotherhood”. The early tricolours were not standardised: orange was sometimes put next to the staff. The flag was little used between 1848 and 1916, when the green flag with the harp still held sway.