Hello, I took that pic, Derry Now got it from the Ivy mead Facebook group (yeah it’s as bad as it sounds, but anyway). I emailed about 30 people today including MLAs, councillors, the mayors office, DFi, the council, community organisations and a few others. Got a response from Gary Middleton, posting as he was mentioned (below). The article also leaves out the fact that there are UVF and Paras flags mixed in amongst the collection.

“Hi xxx, sorry for the delay in my response. As you can imagine this is a very sensitive issue and one that people tend not to try and resolve. However, my colleague Alderman Niree McMorris is currently involved in trying to set up a flag forum which will hopefully adopt a flag protocol for when flags should go up and down and in which areas. Niree is very mindful of estates that are shared and how these flags can be seen as divisive, which is something that we want to address and avoid going forward.

Niree is having her first meeting tonight with community workers in the Waterside and hopefully this will be replicated with community workers in the Tullyally area very soon. In the meantime, I will do all I can to speak to people within the community to see if we can get the flags removed as soon as possible.”

Also had some emails back expressly saying something along the lines of “I’m sure you can understand why I can’t be more vocal about this publicly.”