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Editorial
Alwyn Thomson
Comment:
Failed Politics?
Norman Hamilton
From
the Director: Words and Deeds
David W Porter
Loyalism
and Me
Philip Rankin
Real
Life
David Campton
Policing
Matters
Sam Pollock
The
Crisis Within
Eddie
Kinner
Loyalism
- The Issues
Mervyn Gibson
Scapegoating
Billy Mitchell
Review...Beyond
Retribution
Stephen Graham
Down
to Basics
Malachy
O'Doherty
Faith
in the Future
David
W Porter
For
God and His Glory Alone:
Study 1: Love
DOWN TO BASICS
NOW we are
getting down to the basics. In the past we have seen principled and ideological
positions advanced to explain why people took to the streets to stone
the police or their neighbours. It was to do with civil rights, or prisoners,
or the right to march, or police brutality or the Anglo Irish agreement.
The people who led these issues did not usually lead the riots, but they
interpreted the riots as the inevitable outworking of the pain caused
by constitutional uncertainty or the denial of rights.
Not any more.
No principle is at stake on Short Strand, any more than on the Limestone Road or Ardoyne.
No political translator of the pain of these communities is telling us that if only the law was to change this way, or the constitution that way, or the Brits were to go home or the Orangemen had their hill, there would be peace.
You get the usual apologists – community representatives who see little or no blame on their own side, who put it down to Unionist alienation or police mismanagement. We live in a political culture in which violence is expected and in which the blame for it always attaches to an outsider's provocation, never to the insider.
Violence now does not come out of an issue. It is down to this: that Prods and Taigs in some areas can barely stand the sight of each other. For once, no one is saying that any principle is at stake. It is driven by old fashioned sectarian hatred, the thing that was always there, behind all the riots of the past, previously garnished by political rationale but not any more.
The message coming out of the interface areas is that Catholics and Protestants simply cannot peacefully be close to each other. It is a depressing message. If it is true, then there is no point in all our political creativity, and only re-partition of Northern Ireland will bring peace.
The instincts of the paramilitary organisations fuelling the riots have always been segregationist. That has been most obvious of the UDA, which never, to my knowledge, has had Catholic members, though the IRA has had Protestant members, if only a few.
There was a statement from the UDA back in 1972, offering shelter to defecting Catholics. Only a lunatic would have taken it seriously.
Loyalist thinkers have been unexpectedly accommodating, as in the UDA's Common Sense document, but the energy which drives the organisation is contempt for Taigs.
The Loyalist project has always been to clear Catholics out of their territory, even – especially – when those Catholics were in minorities which contributed virtually nothing, by their negligible votes, to the political character of the areas themselves. It is hard to attribute political intelligence to people who behave in such a way.
It was fear of Protestants which produced the massive consolidation of Catholic west Belfast. Does anyone seriously believe that Sinn Fein could have created a ghetto on its own initiative? Is that an achievement for Loyalism to be proud of?
I'd hate to be responsible for suggesting a better idea to them, but if they think they can save Ulster by shifting populations around, their political interest would be in eroding Catholic majorities, not eradicating Catholic minorities. They should be enticing Catholics into safe Unionist constituencies, like east Belfast, where they will have no political impact, not picking them off at interfaces.
But then, lateral thinking has never been a Loyalist approach.
They say it is not
about Taigs but about territory, imagining that Catholic population growth
can be confined to current ghetto boundaries and that those who want to
move into Protestant streets are the vanguard of a filthy conspiracy.
This is equivalent to telling Catholics not to have children.
Catholic sectarianism
is more discreet. Republicans don't
publicly announce their aversion to Protestants; they contain it within
their humour, and with expressions which they don't use in political speeches;
expressions like "your own" or "the other sort". They
know that there is credit to be gained from disguising sectarianism, yet
their premise is that they live beside a community which cannot be trusted
to make a fair deal with them and which must always be coerced.
Republicans deny
responsibility for the violence on the streets but their claim to total
innocence is not credible. But why would they stir trouble that jeopardises
a political agreement they say they support? Either they don't really
support it at all or they just can't resist having an odd whack at the
police or the Prods.
Their primary target
is the police, and there is logic in that.
They want to position them as 'Black Bastards'. But treating Protestant
responses to this as irrelevant is acting as if nothing Protestants do
has any political value. That's sectarian.
The friction between the Loyalists and the IRA in east Belfast threatens the agreement that both the UVF and the IRA say they support. The police believe they shot a Republican in Short Strand in June. Imagine how the political context would have been changed by an IRA funeral. If the gunman was Real or Continuity, his death would have given a new legitimacy to dissidence, and his supporters would be celebrating him as a defender of his people.
If he was a Provo, Gerry Adams would have carried the coffin and the Unionists would have walked out of the Assembly.
Someone will die in this rioting, and then the political groupings will exact their political advantage from it, and the paramilitaries will make the excuse for further rioting, and we will all forget in time that this was started either for another, undeclared reason, or for no reason, perhaps just to create a new generation of instability and force new political negotiations in the future.
The police now know that the way to prevent this spiralling out of control is to try very hard not to kill anybody. They must be restrained. But they should use their water cannons, liberally, with freezing water, preferably with indelible dye in it too, so that we can see the people who are wrecking our future.
Malachi O'Doherty is Editor of Fortnight magazine.
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