Blue Pallets, Red Pallets and the Politics of Legitimacy: Who Really Owns Belfast’s Bonfires?

Every July, as Northern Ireland prepares for the Twelfth celebrations, towering stacks of wooden pallets appear on streets across loyalist Belfast. Many are painted blue, others red. The blue ones belong to CHEP (Commonwealth Handling Equipment Pool) a global logistics company whose reusable pallets are leased to businesses across 60 countries, never sold, always intended to be returned. The red ones belong to LPR (La Palette Rouge) a French company operating the same model. Neither company has given permission, nor was consulted. And yet, year after year, their property goes up in flames.

At last year’s Craigyhill bonfire in Larne alone, of an estimated 8,596 pallets, around 3,470 belonged to CHEP and 300 to LPR. Industry insiders put the total value of material on that single bonfire at over £130,000. So the question worth asking is what this persistent impunity tells us about the state of civil authority in large parts of working class Northern Ireland, and whether some of us still live in a paradigm where paramilitary culture informally decides what laws do or don’t apply.

The Eleventh Night bonfire is a real tradition with genuine roots. Communities have gathered around these fires since the 18th century, marking King William’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne. And they’re not just spectacles. At their best they build community cohesion, pass knowledge between generations, and provide a focal point for collective identity in areas that have long felt marginalised and ignored. Even though it rarely appears in the news headlines, that really does matter.

Tradition and pallet theft are two different things. And those who defend it are not paying for it. The businesses whose pallets are taken, the supply chains disrupted, the residents breathing toxic smoke from chemically treated wood bear the costs. Some pallets are treated with Methyl Bromide and Sulfuryl fluoride, capable of causing serious damage to lungs, liver and kidneys. The community asserting a cultural right to the bonfire is largely not the community absorbing those consequences.

But it points to something deeper. The Troubles corroded civic values and rewarded uncivic ones over more than a generation. Those habits of mind won’t go away easily. In communities where paramilitary structures historically set the rules, the transition to normal civic life is incomplete. These bonfires make it visible. Stolen pallets are a small but telling expression of a post-conflict landscape where certain unelected groups retain informal authority to decide the rules for everyone else.

There is a legitimacy trap here. Loyalist leaders are not defending theft on principle but trying to work against what they feel is a slippery slope. Any concession on the pallets risks being read as one on the fires as well. So the indefensible gets defended, not out of conviction, but out of strategic necessity. The result is a politics of legitimacy dressed as cultural defence, in which civil law is quietly subordinated to identity. The poorest communities are left to absorb the consequences.

The economic dimension of this is rarely discussed in the context of bonfires, but it should be. Investment is not sentimental. It flows to where civil norms hold, where the rules are predictable, and where informal power structures don’t add invisible costs to doing business. This version of bonfire season is not the cause of economic marginalisation in loyalist Belfast — but it is a symptom of the same underlying condition, one that actively works against the interests of the very communities it claims to represent.

No one should argue for abolishing the Eleventh Night. But at some point it must be asked whether the people organising these events are genuinely serving their communities or a set of political and cultural interests that depend on those communities remaining defined by grievance, performance and conflict. The long war produced some highly uncivil habits of mind that outlasted the violence and are on display every July, painted blue and red, going up in smoke.

A tradition worth keeping should be able to sustain itself within the law. If it can’t (or won’t) then what’s actually being defended is not a culture but a power structure. And power structures, unlike traditions, deserve no protection at all.

Mick Fealty

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