Audio By Carbonatix
Aris Roussinos, who has been living in Belfast for some time, says that the normal sectarian divisions are still the structural and social architecture of Northern Ireland. But an African migrant who attacked and attempted to behead a man was confronted by a Catholic nationalist and inspired protests, riots, and even a little pogrom-like violence in Protestant Loyalist sections of Belfast.
Roussinos reports:
The idea of Catholics and Protestants uniting against mass immigration is, overwhelmingly, one pushed more by Loyalists than by Nationalists, with the former observing both the rabid hostility displayed by Loyalist activists to expressions of cultural identity like the Irish language, and the frequent violent intimidation of Catholics living in working-class Protestant areas as far more of an immediate and existential threat. Indeed, even Nationalists hostile to mass immigration view any coordination with Loyalists as a strategic catastrophe, gifting ammunition to their pro-immigration enemies within Irish Republicanism. But in the aftermath of the North Belfast atrocity, there has for the very first time begun, though certainly not an alliance, then the first glimmerings of a tentative and distrustful rapprochement. The nightmare scenario for Sinn Féin would have been Catholics rioting against immigrants. That did not happen: instead, working-class Catholics merely turned out to watch their Protestant neighbors riot with an anthropological detachment newly devoid of open contempt. I have never until now heard working-class Catholics, from devoutly Republican areas, talking about the coming together of the “Orange and the Green” with anything other than derision. At Ardoyne Roundabout, one of North Belfast’s most volatile sectarian interface areas, protestors from both communities shook hands and declared amity in scenes that were genuinely startling.
