UK flag removed from Leisureland website following complaint to Council

From this week’s Galway City Tribune – A miniature icon depicting the ‘Union Jack’ flag, alongside Ireland’s tricolour, has been removed from the website of Leisureland after the Mayor of Galway labelled it disrespectful.

Duty Manager of Leisureland, Ian Brennan, removed the symbols denoting the British flag and Irish flag (to choose between English language and Irish language versions of the site) after a complaint from Mayor Colette Connolly last Friday.

The Mayor had also written to the Chief Executive of Galway City Council, who own the Salthill swimming pool facility, and urged him to remove the British flag.

“Words fail me when I see the English flag [sic] alongside the Irish Flag on the Leisureland website, surely GCC [Galway City Council] cannot sanction this total disrespect for our national flag. I would ask for the immediate removal of same,” she told Brendan McGrath in an email seen by the Galway City Tribune.

The flags have since been replaced with the words ‘English’ and ‘Irish’, which have the same functionality as the flags.

The Mayor told the Tribune she discovered the flag icons when she was booking a swim, and felt it was disrespectful.

“I wasn’t making a big thing of it, and I’m not making a political football out of it. But I felt it was important – we don’t use flags to denote languages in that manner on a public facility’s website. The operations manager Ian Brennan agreed with me, and he took it down straight away . . . I think it can be misconstrued. I’m not making a political football out of it but to be honest it can be upsetting because it gives the idea that somehow, here we are flying the Irish flag and English flag [sic] alongside each other and that’s not what you do in an independent country” she said.

This is a shortened preview version of this article. To read the rest of the story, see this week’s Galway City Tribune. You can buy a digital edition HERE.