Essential Ireland's colours and banner inspired by the Flag of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin
Our Logo - Essential Irelands’ Green & Gold Banner and its origins
To celebrate the important year of 2016, Essential Ireland Tours decided we would change our logo and company colours to reflect a pivotal point in Irish history. The 1916 Easter Rising against the British Empire.
Patrick and Stephen were eager for a logo and company identity that would feel fresh as we launched our new website. We engaged the services of logo designers at home and abroad. But as always the case when you have headstrong people involved, we couldn't agree on a final logo.Then one night Stephen had a dream…
This beautiful flag had been flown by the Irish rebels over the GPO, the General Post Office in Dublin in 1916. It still survives today. The lads decided to have a replica hand-made so be flown on Easter Sunday 2016, out front of their luxury boutique hotel in Dingle, Milltown House. On the day Stephen collected the flag in Dublin, he had a fight to catch to Seattle, so the ‘Irish Republic’ flag inadvertently took a world-tour before reaching its home in County Kerry. After a night in Kells Irish pub in downtown Seattle with his friend and owner, the aptly named Patrick Pearse McAleese, Stephen had a dream that saw him hoist he flag up the pole in Dingle, but when it unfurled to fly gallantly in the strong Atlantic breeze,rather than say ‘Irish Republic’ on it, it body said ‘Essential Ireland’, and thus our new logo and flag was born. We immediately got onto our graphic-designer/videographer/web-guru Eileen Kennedy(an Irish-American from Boston, living in Galway but with an Irish Granny from Dingle and thus an Irish passport) and gave her the brief. We want the same flag, same shade of green, same font, same colours. And she came up with the goods and also a funky version with the words of the 1916 Proclamation of Independence subtly looming in the background.
The historical background to the flag:
2016 is a very important year of anniversaries in Ireland. For example up North many people in the Unionist Community will remember their ancestor who fought for the British Army and were slaughtered in huge numbers at the Battle of the Somme, WW1. While over 100,000 men from this proud Island were away fighting in the battlefields of Northern France and Belgium, a much smaller number of Irish nationalists decided to stay at home and launch an attack on the British Empire in Dublin. Declaring Ireland a free and independent Republic on Easter Monday 1916. This daring move by around 1000 rebels did not last a week and its leaders were executed in Kilmainham Gaol.
