Gerry Lynch writes:
Every city is a palimpsest, in the pattern of whose streets and buildings, stories etched in the past remain legible. Even when there has been a careful attempt to forget and obscure, the careful observer might note a plinth minus a statue, or a temple converted to secular use. In Belfast, a city where bluntness is prized as a badge of honesty, nobody tries to obscure what has gone before: the past shouts its obsessions into the ear of the present in 20-foot gable-end murals and slogans on its notorious “peace walls”.
On Monday night, Hadi Alodid, a Sudanese refugee hitherto of no importance, managed to rivet Belfast’s global future onto the conflicts of its past when he hacked at the head of Stephen Ogilvie, while a neighbour recorded on her mobile phone. Alodid can scarcely have known that his attack was taking place at The Troubles’ epicentre: in North Belfast’s Byzantine sectarian geography, Kinnaird Avenue sits in a ribbon of firmly Irish Republican territory connecting the Sinn Féin heartlands of the New Lodge and Ardoyne. Barely 400 metres away, guarded by walls and fences disguised as urban parks, sits the “interface” with Ulster Loyalism’s Haram al-Sharif, the Shankill. Duncairn Avenue, where Alodid lived, just round the corner from the attack, runs into the junction of the Antrim Road and the New Lodge Road, the most dangerous spot of all in Northern Ireland’s lengthy civil conflict. In the Seventies, the notorious Shankill Butchers gangs cruised these streets in the middle of the night, looking for Catholics walking home from parties, drunk, so they could kidnap them and take them back to the Shankill to torture them before murdering them.
When the Belfast Telegraph’s Suzanne Breen wrote an article reminding readers of that history, where violent knife attacks were entirely home grown, she was savaged by overseas online Right-wingers for arrant cuckery. But one cannot understand the pattern of this week’s events in Belfast — where, after a brutal assault by a Muslim immigrant in one of the city’s Republican strongholds, Republican neighbourhoods remained quiet while Loyalist districts saw violent protests and a seemingly well-orchestrated campaign in which immigrant families were burned out — without understanding the city’s recent past, and how it has led the leaderships of each major community to interpret the growth of the city’s ethnic minority population differently.
To what extent the leaders of Northern Ireland’s Nationalists can continue to take an almost entirely unfinessed pro-immigration line, and how the region’s small but rapidly growing ethnic minority communities will engage with its Nationalist and Unionist traditions, are two of the biggest imponderables in the region’s politics. Northern Ireland’s ethnic minority populations may be small, but as the demographic balance of the region’s indigenous groups sits on a knife-edge, and The Troubles refuse to recede entirely into the past, their views and contributions may be decisive to the region’s future. Indeed, the story of Kinnaird Avenue, the street where the attack took place, is itself revealing of Belfast’s inability to put The Troubles behind it. The street was only built in the 2010s, long after The Troubles ended in fits and starts in the mid-to-late Nineties, yet it is perceived as Republican territory.
It sits on part of the Girdwood army barracks site, a 20-minute stroll from the voguish downtown warehouse conversions of the Cathedral Quarter. When it was decommissioned in 2005, there was hope that it would provide desegregated housing and shared leisure facilities, acting as a bridge between the Loyalist Greater Shankill and Republican New Lodge areas — the beginning of the end of the Balkanisation of North Belfast.
This hope was in vain. In the end, only 60 houses, less than a third of the planned number, were completed in this area of significant need. Scuppering the hope were two demographic issues that remain acute in post-Troubles North Belfast: Unionist decline and the paranoia this engenders, and the desperate housing shortage and overcrowding among Nationalists. Sectarian boundaries were fixed in the early Seventies, and while people from both communities were intimidated from areas where they were in the local minority, Catholics were the bigger losers. Gradually, mixed areas, often the better-off ones, tended to become predominantly Nationalist as Catholics who moved up the social scale in the wake of anti-discrimination laws sought out available local housing.
A second extensive round of mutual intimidation took place in the late Nineties, as Northern Ireland was supposedly welcoming the new peace. I remember vividly canvassing in North Belfast for the Alliance Party in the 1998 Assembly elections which immediately followed the Good Friday Agreement. On perhaps a dozen occasions I went to a house with names on the electoral register to find it had been abandoned in a hurry just weeks or even days previously, with children’s textbooks and toys lying scattered in the hall. Some were Nationalists who had long been living peacefully in Loyalist areas; some were Unionists who had long been living peacefully in Republican areas. Other people decided their presence was no longer welcome and the lives these mostly deeply apolitical people had built for themselves were destroyed. This didn’t happen in middle-class areas, only among the poor. By the 2010s, the North Belfast parliamentary seat was held by the Democratic Unionist Party, but only by a thin majority over Sinn Féin. The DUP reckoned that, given the imbalance in local social housing waiting lists, the lion’s share of the houses would go to Nationalists, so stalled on the development. Sinn Féin took the seat in 2019 anyway.
As far as Belfast natives went, the houses that were actually built on the New Lodge side of the site, including Kinnaird Avenue, were occupied by Nationalists, those on the Greater Shankill side by Unionists. Last May, when some Nationalist families moved into newly built houses on the Shankill side of the peace wall, having been duly allocated to them by Northern Ireland’s public housing authority, Loyalists attacked their homes with masonry and almost all fled. In the new Northern Ireland, though, some things have changed: the DUP condemned the attacks as resolutely as their Sinn Féin counterparts in their often-uncomfortable all-party power-sharing government. But Nationalists are still intermittently intimidated out of Loyalist areas, not just in North Belfast but across Northern Ireland — something almost entirely ignored outside the region.
So, it isn’t entirely surprising when Loyalists call for protests against migrants or immigration, that Nationalists, even if they are concerned about the rapid rise in immigration, or even if they are frank racists, are loath to join in. This is even more the case when the protests bear clear hallmarks of being organised by Loyalist paramilitaries. Northern Ireland’s police claim still to be assessing whether they were directly involved in this week’s events, but something of the fear they still engender can be seen in the way the notices calling for the protests, which commanded “all businesses to close” at a given time each day – “no excuses” — were almost universally obeyed, even by schools and museums.
While some members of armed Loyalist groups duly laid down their arms and returned to normal life as part of the decommissioning process of the mid-2000s, others morphed into a sort of Ulster mafia, heavily involved in organised crime, and aware that as long as they refrain from targeting members of the Nationalist community in overtly political or sectarian attacks, they are likely to be treated with kid gloves by the authorities. Sudden, short-lived, outbreaks of rioting, enough to annoy but not enough to make residents of working-class Loyalist areas turn vociferously against them, have long been a means for them to flex their muscles. This is the third summer in a row when Northern Ireland has witnessed a sudden outbreak of intense racist intimidation, which disappears almost as soon as it arrives, and while Loyalist paramilitaries don’t seem to have started any of these outbreaks, they seem to have developed strategies for capitalising on them rapidly.
Northern Ireland Nationalists are also acutely aware that the Right-wing British figures expressing concern after a barbaric attack by a Muslim asylum seeker in one of their neighbourhoods are usually hostile to them, and rarely express any concern on the many occasions when the people attacking them are white Britons.
It is into this site of chronic long-term sectarian territorial conflict, with an unbroken habit of intimidating local minorities from their homes, that the level of immigration has increased, very obviously and very rapidly, since the mid-2010s, but especially since the pandemic. Similar things are seen all over Western Europe. But this isn’t all over Western Europe — Belfast is Ground Zero for the Troubles, its worst outbreak of violence in the past 80 years, a recent past that continues to define the present.
It isn’t historically unusual for civilisational ideological conflicts to be subsumed into long-standing local disputes in deeply divided societies — see what happened under Nazi occupation in Belgium, Yugoslavia, or the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands. The idea that Nationalists are on the Left and Unionists on the Right is already pretty deeply rooted in Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin, so far, seems to be both ideologically committed to a pro-immigration stance and believes it will reap long-term rewards in a region where the balance of power between the two traditional ethno-sectarian blocs, neither of which is in a majority, is increasingly influenced by ethnic minorities and detribalised bourgeois liberals.
Yet survey data shows that Catholics are only marginally more supportive of immigration than Protestants in Northern Ireland. The potential for a backlash, then, within Northern Ireland Nationalism to the pro-migration approach of its leaders is very real. Similarly, if more incidents like this occur in Republican areas, I wouldn’t assume that attitudes to migrants there couldn’t sour rapidly, as they have among the working class in the Republic, and then some sort of anti-immigration force emerge to challenge the status quo in Nationalist politics. This could come in either or both of two forms: an electoral challenge or a challenge on the streets. As far as the latter goes, Aontú, a conservative splinter from Sinn Féin that is only moderately restrictionist on immigration, has never caught wind, especially in the North. But new political parties emerging from nowhere is a hallmark of the 2020s, and Northern Ireland has a big election year in 2027, a rare year when seats on local councils and the region’s Assembly are up for grabs at the same time. The evidence that a few Nationalists were indeed joining in with Loyalist-led protests, and others regarded them with less hostility than in the past, is a sign that some sort of street-based anti-immigrant movement might have legs; although, if it emerged, it would face considerable and perhaps physical opposition from the cluster of groups that are both leftwards of and more militant than Sinn Féin, already extant in Belfast’s Republican strongholds.
My hometown’s palimpsest has long contained story after story of people being put out of their homes because of their religion. Increasingly it is collecting stories of people being put out of their homes because of the colour of their skin. Being burned out of your home just because of who you are is, sadly, as Belfast as it gets. As racial diversity increases and insecurity grows, this city of the frozen conflict is perhaps the continent’s least predictable and most combustible powder keg.
