When it was suggested to him that the cost of the super-sized flag flying outside the National Stadium was two million dollars, Sport Minister Gary Hunt neither confirmed nor denied it because, we suspect, he did not have the figure at his fingertips. What he did, though, was to brush off whatever the actual cost was by saying that one could not put a price on patriotism.

Mr Hunt should have admitted that he did not know what the price was and simply left it at that. By going further, as he thought on his feet, Mr Hunt fell into the kind of foolishness that even more experienced politicians are guilty of when they believe they are being profound.

If we were to follow the Minister’s line of argument we could end up declaring that were the flag to have cost a billion dollars nobody should protest or even raise a query but this is not tenable since the cost of anything has to be considered whenever public money is being spent, whatever the sincerity of intention.

While a country’s flag can serve as a rallying point for citizens it does not in itself raise the level of patriotism which is usually inculcated from a very young age and which, for the most part, is a given among nations with many wars fought not for a lack of it but for a fundamental over-abundance it.

Moreover, while a flag is a powerfully bonding national symbol-which is why all countries have them-its size or the height at which it flies is of little importance with most expressions of patriotism exhibited by small flags waved by citizens at various occasions, ceremonial or otherwise, as happened when Trinidad and Tobago won a place at the football World Cup finals in Germany or in the hands of Trinbagonians who were on hand in India to cheer on this country during the recent cricket Champions League campaign.

We have to be careful of trying too hard to instil by indoctrination what should be innate. It is the rare person who does not feel for the country in which he was born and raised and any country that does not have the allegiance or love of the vast majority of citizens is a dysfunctional one. Trinidad and Tobago is hardly that but Mr Hunt somehow seems not to know this what with his unwittingly doing the opposite of what he intended and putting a price on patriotism.