It being the week of the Glorious Twelfth it is fitting that the great cultural festival that is the celebration of hundreds of years of Protestant settler domination in the north east of Ireland ought to be at the centre of attention.
While one bonfire is to be investigated for ‘hate crime’ all of the others, which confine themselves to burning GAA jerseys, tricolours, photos of Sinn Féin election candidates – probably the new Pope will make an appearance here and there – and other Taig stuff, will be deemed just a bit of crack.
Meanwhile in South Belfast the PSNI appear to have come to the same conclusion as unspecified “loyalist paramilitaries,” namely that “the risk of the bonfire proceeding as planned was lower and more manageable than the intervention of contractors and the proposed methodology of dismantling it”.
In effect rejecting the elected Belfast City Council’s call for the police to assist contractors in dismantling the bonfire not because the bonfire was ‘hateful’ but because it was partly made up of asbestos and due to its proximity to an electricity substation that supplies power to the Belfast City and Royal Victoria hospitals.
The loyalist statement agreed with the PSNI that attempting to remove the bonfire in South Belfast would lead to “widespread and sustained disorder.” The statement noted that the “PSNI have been advised of the risk of widespread disorder, with loyalists in other areas across NI staging interface riots to stretch the PSNI.”
“Interface riots” are code for loyalist attacks on Catholic areas which “interface” with areas in which members of the migrant descended loyalists live. A salutary lesson perhaps that mass immigration does not always lead to diverse intercultural harmony. Not even after hundreds of years.
The PSNI statement might in some contexts be regarded as amusing given the similarity of the sentiment to the loyalist missive. Echoes of the past perhaps in which the not famously erudite loyalist death squads would often have required the assistance of chaps who had studied English comprehension at one of the better grammar schools in penning their messages to the world.
Cultural significance aside, July 12 – which is a floating feast as preparations for it begin weeks before and the buzz carries on into August when Derry, or Londonderry in this context, hosts the Apprentice Boys hootenanny on the second Saturday of the month – has always been a time of fear for northern and particularly Belfast Catholics.
It is no coincidence that the Twelfth sparked the events that led to the worst onslaught on Belfast Catholics since July 1935, in August of 1969, when hundreds of homes were burned out and thousands forced to flee south of the border.
I was recently reading Proinsias Mac an Bheatha’s Téid Focal le Gaoith which describes how his mother and siblings had to leave their home in West Belfast in 1922 after their house was broken into and wrecked by loyalists with the seeming indifference of the RUC. They had already lived through what has accurately been described as the pogrom of 1920.
More than 250 Catholics were murdered in Belfast between 1920 and 1922. Some of them, like the six members of the McMahon family, by members of the RUC Special Constabulary. So it is hardly surprising that even today the Catholic population of Belfast in particular looks upon this event with trepidation. Many plan their holidays around it but some, in more exposed parts, have no choice but to remain and hope that it all passes over.
Which brings me to the farcical scene at the GPO on Tuesday when a few clowns decided that it might be a good idea to share a stage with Mark Sinclair, a self-confessed British agent in the UVF.
As with an earlier episode involving minor figures claiming to speak for the Coolock opposition to the now-abandoned IPAS centre proposal, there is a pattern here worth noting. When nationalist protests against asylum centres or immigration policy are presented as being linked to loyalist figures, the result is reputational damage and a loss of credibility.
It is an interesting coincidence that another report, from the elite and intelligence adjacent Institute for Strategic Dialogue, claiming that such close links exist, and various media reports and political commentary echoing the same line, should all appear at the same time as this ragtag gathering.
Most voices in the protest movement, including Dublin City Councillor Malachy Steenson, have been explicit in rejecting any association with loyalists. Councillor Steenson has rightly described such links as “embarrassing and toxic.” The effect of these associations is corrosive, and there are separate, well-known ties between elements of the loyalist underworld and some of those profiting from the asylum accommodation system.
As for claims about “reaching out to the Protestant people of the north,” they do not withstand scrutiny. The UVF, UDA, and other loyalist groups do not represent that community, many of whom share the same legitimate concerns about immigration as people across the island.
Their political wings have not even a single Councillor in the north. They are basically gangs whose seeming domination of parts of Belfast and other towns is based on fear and intimidation. The same fear and intimidation they have visited upon the Catholics of the north through terror. A terror that many will feel an echo of when they see the flames light up the sky tonight.
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