Green, white, and orange, in vertical stripes. It’s the same three colors either way, which is exactly why the Irish and Ivorian flags get mixed up so often, sometimes in fairly public ways. A Belfast shop had to put up a sign during the 2014 World Cup clarifying that the flag in its window was Ivory Coast’s, not Ireland’s, and a Dublin pub made the same mix-up in 2016.
The fix is simple once you know it: check which side the green is on. Ireland flies green at the hoist (the side nearest the pole), then white, then orange. Ivory Coast reverses it, orange at the hoist, then white, then green. Mirror images of each other.
The stories behind the colors couldn’t be more different, though. Ireland’s tricolor dates to 1848, first flown during the Young Irelander Rebellion and formally adopted decades later. Its colors are political rather than decorative: green for Irish Catholics and the nationalist tradition, orange for the Protestant minority tied to William of Orange, and white in the middle standing for peace between the two. It’s a flag built entirely around reconciliation.
Ivory Coast’s flag came from a very different place. Adopted in 1959, a year ahead of independence from France, its vertical layout borrows from the French tricolor, a common template for former French colonies. But the colors turn away from politics and toward geography: orange for the northern savannas, white for peace, and green for the country’s southern forests.
Even the proportions differ slightly, Ireland’s flag is longer and narrower than Ivory Coast’s, though that’s not something you’d catch on a phone screen from across a stadium. The color order is really the only tell that matters, and even that trips people up often enough that it’s become something of a running joke on both sides.