Robin Monotti

BELFAST RIOTS - Some context from Gerry Lynch just yesterday morning before last night's riots:

"The North Belfast attack happened in a Republican area, about 400 metres from an interface with a Loyalist area. Last year, when Catholics/Nationalists moved into newly built houses on former waste ground at that interface, Loyalists attacked their homes with masonry (see QT).

Two factors have long defined demographics in North Belfast: Protestant/Loyalist decline and the paranoia this engenders, and acute housing shortage and overcrowding among Catholics/Nationalists. North Belfast, a checkerboard of single-identity and a few mixed neighbourhoods, had the Troubles' highest body count, and the most dangerous spot of all, the corner of the Antrim Road and the New Lodge Road is even closer to Kinnaird Avenue than the interface.

Sectarian boundaries were fixed in the early 1970s, and while people from both communities were intimidated from areas where they were in the local minority, Catholics were the bigger losers. Over the decades since, the mixed areas, generally the better off ones, have gradually became predominantly Catholic. But only one area understood as Loyalist from the early 1970s has ever shifted to being Republican, Torrens, in a second extensive round of mutual intimidation in the late 1990s which also saw settled local minorities from both sides of the community intimidated from areas around the Whitewell and Shore Roads. Catholics/Nationalists are still routinely intimidated out of Loyalist areas if the shortage of housing in Republican areas drives them to take the risk.

It is into this site of chronic long-term sectarian territorial conflict that the level of immigration has increased, very obviously and very rapidly, since about the mid-2010s, but especially since the pandemic. Some of this has been into streets that have been sites of territorial conflict since the 1800s (for obvious reasons, rents are often a little lower there). Locals unable to secure housing locally are moving out of Belfast altogether. Similar things are seen all over Western Europe. But this isn't all over Western Europe - this is Ground Zero for what was its worst outbreak of violence in the last 80 years.

It didn't take you to be a political genius to see several ways in which this situation could explode, but it take you to be able to speak honestly about those scenarios. That is impossible on the liberal-left and in officialdom, as Officialese has no vocabulary to describe localised ethnic conflict in any terms other than the idea that if beastly White bigots weren't so beastly, then everything would be alright. Nationalist, Alliance, and Green politicians who can discuss conflict between Republicans and Loyalists in frank and adult terms in both public and private suddenly retreat behind slogans once anyone from outside NI is involved.

What happens next? I have no idea. As this happened in a Republican area, there is some prospect that it won't get out of hand. These are places where people are acutely aware that the hard right figures expressing concern this morning don't give a tinker's damn on the many occasions when the people attacking them are British Whites. But I would also stop assuming that social media is more important in forming people's opinions than what they can see happening in their own district, and I wouldn't underestimate the shock this will engender. If this had happened in a Loyalist area the racist pogrom would already be starting this morning, and if more incidents like this occur in Republican areas, I wouldn't assume that attitudes to migrants couldn't sour rapidly.

I tweeted on 11 May that Belfast could be a right little powder-keg. And so it became 28 days later.

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3.94K viewsedited 05:18