Another day, another incident
In Magherafelt, a fractured skull. In Portadown, three injured. In Belfast, a home attacked. On a ferry, an MP and his wife verbally abused.
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Total Politics: Top 20 NI Blogs…
Fair play to Iain, he managed to get over 2,200 people voting in his poll for the top Northern Irish blogs this year… We (just, I imagine) retained our top spot, with Splintered coming straight in at number 2, no doubt his pet subject du jour will have garnered him a lot of fans… I’ve [...] read our review »
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Against Remembrance – Seminar & Book by David Rieff
Is the best way to overcome the legacy of conflict simply to forget about it? Author and journalist David Rieff spoke on this subject last week in a seminar at the Institute for International Integration Studies (IIIS) at Trinity College Dublin. Rieff has recently written a book titled, Against Remembrance (published in Ireland by Liffey [...] read our review »
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Books: Listening to Van Morrison…
Great little review of Listening to Van Morrison by Griel Marcus… It’s a short book, not a biography or a career survey, but an attempt to follow those moments in Morrison’s music, as he’s made it from his first records with Them, from Belfast in 1965 to the present day, when something happens that breaks [...] read our review »
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make sectarianism history, time to move on lads!
fd, I suppose, in a few years time, these thugs – from both sides of the house – could be elected as MLAS, maybe even become members of the Executive …
[aside]It seems that not all threads/comments are being picked up in the Latest Comments list. Technical glitch?
Francesco,
Are you talking to Fair Deal or to the perpetrators of these foul incidents?
Cue a useless motion from the assembly saying “down with this sort of thing…”
“Careful now”
But, but, how can this be? Why, in an earlier thread all the posters were telling us that only these nasty things happen in Derry and by implication the rest of the praw-vince was a haven of tranquility, imagine, there’s nasty thugs in other parts of Norn Iron too, whodathunkit?
How about enforcing the law? Do the police not see any of this? Wait a minute, there is no law, at least not the right kind. Northern Ireland is a thugs paradise.
Social change my arse, a stiff custodial sentence would make your average thug think twice about repeating such behaviour and he might pass the message along to his mates.
The best why to support the police is to pass zero tolerance legislation for any type of anti social behaviour.
McGrath, this thuggery seems to exist throughout the UK. A few months ago there was a father murdered after going outside to remonstrate with some thugs causing a problem outside of the house, somewhere in England. There is a Clockwork Orange-esque spide problem right across the whole country (no, I’m not talking about the clothes shop).
Here in Newtownabbey, something like half of the total amount of crime reported is either YCA (“Youths Causing Annoyance” – yes, it has a separate category for statistics gathering purposes – see here) or criminal damage which is closely connected with it. At the same time this crime has the lowest clearance rate because the protagonists usually cannot be identified.
There is a marked reluctance within the police to confront this problem. I’m sure there may be internal reasons within the police for this (eg not wanting to do lots of paperwork) but I also think that government policy is probably something to do with it. Several times I have been told by the police that they don’t regard taking action as a solution, that anti-social behaviour is a society problem that the community needs to work together to resolve. There is truth to this but the police seem to be using it as a blank cheque to justify not doing anything about it.
Comrade:
So we may have to force the police to run out of excuses here. Why not make it easy on the police, why not make antisocial behaviour one of the easiest infractions to enforce? All it would take is a willing society!
joecanuck
i was referrig to this apparently endless scary mix of sectarianism and thuggery between the irish youth. a quite serieous matter to me.
lack of education and siege ghetto community mentality often lead to such incidents.
Stalin,
The Police take a calm restrained approach, they’re too soft. The take a harder line, they’re being brutal. Theres just no winning is there?
Did it ever occur to you that (and I know some of these areas very well, esp the interface in Magherafelt) one group enters anothers area, attacks it then runs away? The community then will not co-operate with Police?
Please insert social change if ever I saw it.
Just noticed this on indymedia, saying a southern PSF member was responsible for the attack on the bar in Derry. If true, will he be expelled? Was the idiot who fell off the roof expelled? Do we know?
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/84599
the story has been hidden… shinners power!
A normal day in an abnormal society.
Police in dock after attacks
Why didn’t the police intervene promptly? Were they waiting for back-up? Were there sufficient police available?
Policing and the rest of the justice system appears to be a shambles. There are still anecdotes of supposedly ‘pillars of the community’ turning to the paramilitaries to ‘sort out’ matters that should be dealt with by official sources. Apparently, the paramilitaries provide a prompt and efficient service so why waste time going to or reporting incidents to the authorities ….
I recall news reports for the same week in the Kingdom of Moyle where the police couldn’t get to Bushmills to deal with an incident because the police car was elsewhere; ditto for Ballycastle. Ballycastle has a new police station but I understand many of the personnel have been moved to Ballymoney. The police station in Bushmills still looks like a fortress. Perhaps the ‘powers that be’ hope to flog it off to a developer rather than provide a decent community police service – at a time when the policing budget is ‘inadequate’.