Patrick Pearse’s dramatic ‘The fools, the fools’ speech at Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa’s funeral was a key moment in the story of Ireland’s flag. Pearse made the oration alongside a Tricolour draped across the veteran Fenian’s coffin. The Green White and Gold was then flown over the GPO during the Easter Rising, and it was Sinn Féin’s skill as propagandists, alongside the monumentally 'stupid’ British reaction to 1916, that helped the Tricolour ascend, leaving Parnell’s green flag in its wake.