Out with Slugger (we’ve had more than 30k readers this week since Monday) there’s been a general shortage of analysis of how we got to rioting 12 year olds across NI. One obvious exception being Newton, the hardest working ‘hack’:
Inside Politics w/ @hlinehan
"The obnoxiousness, the sneering at loyalist Leave voters… can only be making things worse. It seems more important to far too many people to cling to self-righteousness than to actually fix this" – @NewtonEmersonhttps://t.co/ARlc5mSZCZ
— Irish Times Podcasts (@IrishTimesAudio) April 9, 2021
Another is Jenny McCartney on Unherd, who has a knack for getting to the nub of a problem without getting distracted by the usual sectarian manoeuvrings and blame setting..
What’s it all about? As ever when Northern Ireland catches fire, the match does not fully explain the kindling, although the two are closely related. The match, in this case, was the decision by the Public Prosecution Service not to charge any Sinn Féin politicians with breaking Covid restrictions during the funeral last June of Bobby Storey, a former IRA intelligence director.
Sinn Féin has never been a party to play down a funeral, apart from those the IRA brought about, and Storey’s was a notable event. Michelle O’Neill, the Sinn Féin Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, headed the procession along with Mary Lou McDonald, the party leader, and Gerry Adams, the former party leader.
More than 2,000 people lined the route and followed the cortege, and a snap showed O’Neill with a fellow-mourner’s arm around her, displaying a cavalier disregard for social distancing. [Emphasis added]
She goes on:
…an independent investigation by the Cumbria Constabulary drew up a file relating to 24 Sinn Féin representatives. But the public prosecutor recently refused to take it further, on the basis that the Police Service of Northern Ireland had been substantially involved in agreeing the Storey funeral arrangements in the first place.
The perception among Unionists, and some Nationalists, was that Sinn Féin politicians were blithely operating outside the rules, and that the PSNI leadership was helping them do it.
McCartney then focuses the legacy of communities still dominated by paramilitaries and a culture of thuggery, which with this “extraordinary backdrop of authority in chaos” that has put the First Minister and Chief Constable at odds.
On the ground (ground which rarely features outside the endless cat and mouse game of exposure and threat played between the local Sunday tabloids and these shady paramilitaries), she remembers…
The young Protestant rioters we now see on the nightly news are the children of post-ceasefire Northern Ireland. They are in many ways its lost boys. In their streets — unlike more middle-class areas — the paramilitary threat never went away.
A couple of years ago, I recall attending a community event for schoolchildren on the Protestant Shankill Road in West Belfast, in which a travelling theatre group put on a lively play meant to illustrate the dangers of getting sucked into the criminal orbit of the paramilitaries.
Afterwards, there was a question-and-answer session that included a local policewoman. The teenage boys behind me — quick-witted, both cocky and vulnerable — had watched the play attentively, and later one of them spoke up to ask: “Are the cops scared of the paramilitaries?” The policewoman rather predictably assured him that they weren’t.
Afterwards, I asked him why he had posed the question. It emerged that his father had been shot in the legs by paramilitaries for alleged “anti-social” behaviour years earlier. When he himself had got into an argument with another boy at school, one whose father was “connected,” his family had been warned to leave their house immediately or face the consequences.
A local “mediation” service had managed to get the threat lifted, but I imagine its potential return never felt very far away. The entire landscape of his childhood had been laced with menace, in which the rest of society appeared largely uninterested. As such youths grow up, the local hard-men can appear as their tormentors, role models or, paradoxically, both things at once.
And in terms of the wider politics…
An oft-repeated phrase in the peace process was “parity of esteem”. As Unionists see it, that is rapidly eroding. What loyalist paramilitaries seem now to be seeking is “parity of menace”.
And she perceptively concludes:
…the British Government and the EU have now created an awful incentive for loyalist paramilitaries to demonstrate an equivalent level of threat.
That incentive is not just implied, but actually written into Article 16 of the Protocol itself. There, it states that UK or the EU can unilaterally suspend aspects of the Protocol’s operation if it is causing “serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist”. That’s the political equivalent of a teacher telling a delinquent school pupil that they can only get out of a locked classroom by setting it alight.
The loyalist paramilitaries — whether by instinct or conscious design — will now make it their business to create “serious societal difficulties” that are “liable to persist”. It’s a terrible script. And unless Britain and the EU can somehow rewrite it, fast, it’s going to make for a very long, hot summer.
Photo by icon0.com is licensed under CC0
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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