Boiling over

Riots in Northern Ireland

Sep 15th 2005 BELFAST
From The Economist print edition

The politics of victimhood catches up with Belfast

IT WAS not a very big detour, but the 100-metre diversion last weekend of a Protestant march around a Catholic area threatens to push Northern Ireland's peace process a long way off course. The bricks and burnt-out vehicles that littered Belfast after three days' rioting by working-class loyalists conjured up the unrest of 20 years ago. Back then it was mostly Catholics fighting police and soldiers or Catholics fighting Protestants. This time it was Protestants fighting police and soldiers.

There was a weary inevitability about this week's recriminations. Orangemen condemned the decision to reroute their march; the police condemned the Orangemen; the rioters condemned the police; America's envoy lamented the lack of Protestant leadership; and the main unionist party, the Reverend Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists, dismissed him as “damaged goods”. The rioting came as the IRA is—supposedly—close to decommissioning its arms, now being gathered from across Ireland into a few dumps. That, in turn, follows a Republican promise in July to stop all criminal activity, a step Tony Blair praised with almost indecent haste as being of “unparalleled magnitude”.

In a rudimentary sense, the riots were a reaction to all this, and not about a march at all. Unionists enraged by the idea that their Republican opponents are getting an easy ride from politicians in London and Dublin talked of grievances unaddressed by the authorities, “a cry of desperation”, said the Orange Order Grand Master. Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde pointed out that petrol bombs, pipe bombs and homemade grenades had been prepared and stockpiled before the march. Police film, the chief constable reported, showed Orangemen standing beside masked men orchestrating the violence.

But that is not to say the violence formed much of a plan: even veteran Ireland watchers were alarmed at its arbitrariness. Soon after the rioting began, Orangemen started throwing missiles alongside masked and hooded men and paramilitaries began shooting at soldiers and police. The gunmen fired scores of bullets: a total of 50 shots hit two police vehicles. Near the point where police blocked the marchers' preferred route, a bandsman unzipped his trousers and made obscene gestures. As night fell, rioters in a crowd of about 700 used a stolen digger to flatten lampposts along a stretch of road in east Belfast. Traffic lights buckled, a bus-shelter was uprooted—though the rioters, who can recognise an essential amenity when they see one, largely spared the heavily shuttered pawnbroker advertising “pay day loans”.

The rioting flared in a string of Protestant towns, too. In the village of Ahoghill, heart of an area where outnumbered and isolated Catholic families were attacked over the summer, youths broke windows in the homes Catholics had fled. A bus full of mainly elderly people returning from a church service in Belfast was hijacked near the sedate seaside town of Bangor by armed men, who then robbed the passengers before setting it alight.

Most of the rioting took place in five of Belfast's ten most disadvantaged wards, measured by such things as employment, income and health. From that perspective, it was alarmingly self-defeating, wrecking shops and businesses and driving away would-be investors.

The digger that tore up east Belfast came from a nearby building site for offices, workshops and businesses, that was the brainchild of a partnership created by local community workers with business and government agencies. Like more than 70 projects in Protestant east Belfast supported by £14m of “Peace Fund” money, the partnership is designed to help take the place of the defunct shipyard that was once the district's pride. “We just have to pick ourselves up and start all over again,” one of the east Belfast partnership's founders said stoically.

Even if they were its victims, the poorer districts at first approved of the rioting. People told reporters that violence was the only way to get Mr Blair's attention: “It's all concessions to the IRA—nationalists get everything they want,” one said.

Poverty and the politics of victimhood are aggravated by a criminal feud between Ulster's loyalist paramilitaries. In a murky underworld, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) has always been seen as more political than the larger Ulster Defence Association (UDA)—less steeped in “ordinary” criminality (a relative judgment, of course). In a depressing twist to today's violence, the UVF has been largely blamed for the rioting and for the four deaths in months of fighting with the splinter Loyalist Volunteer Force, a group that now appears entirely devoted to drug-dealing and gangsterism.

These groups, recruited from Ulster's working-class Protestants, are divided from unionist politicians by social class and political rivalry. Their efforts a few years ago to form political parties, following the lead of Sinn Fein, collapsed amid rows about drug dealing and racketeering. For them, riots are just about the only way to make a noise.

On Tuesday, one more ingredient was poured into the mix. The family of Robert McCartney, the Catholic killed by drunken IRA-men in a pub brawl last January, claimed that in east Belfast the IRA used the rioting as cover for a brutal attack on one of the dead man's friends. Although Republicans denied they had been involved, the accusation will only heighten unionists' belief that the IRA is not about to go out of business.
Only seven weeks ago, with the IRA's pledge to quit its career of terrorist murders and bombings once and for all, Northern Ireland seemed about to enter a new phase in its journey towards normality. Everyone knew this would take time: for the IRA to destroy its arms, for elections and for the unionists to come around to the idea that sharing government with Republicans was the least bad thing to do. After this week's violence, that future looks just a bit more uncertain.
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