Jamie Bryson: Removal of flag from Belfast City Hall helped turn loyalists against the 1998 agreement

On December 3 2012 Alliance joined with Sinn Fein and the SDLP to tear the Union flag from the prime civic building of our capital city.

It was a symbolically significant assault on the very right to express the national identity of Northern Ireland as a place in the Union.

That moment set in motion a chain of events which ultimately brings us to where we are now, when – in my view – a vast majority of the unionist/loyalist community have come to view the 1998 Belfast Agreement as a one sided vehicle designed to drive us, against our will, out of the Union. It was in many ways the first tremor, when many people felt enough is enough. That played into the later parading disputes, the de-railing of the Haass talks and ultimately created a melting pot of growing resentment which has bubbled in the decade since and finally boiled over by the imposition of the NI Protocol.

On a personal level I am often asked asked if I regretted taking on that public profile which I now must carry for the rest of my life. It has closed doors for me in terms of pursuing career opportunities I otherwise would have wished to pursue and in that regard it changed my life. But whilst in some moments I lament lost opportunities, given the same choices at the same time, on balance I’d take the same road again.

Jamie Bryson, Co Down