When the blame game turns deadly

Irish Post

a day ago

RACISTS who burned migrants out of their homes this month in Ballymena, County Antrim, have found it strangely difficult to explain what they were up to.
There had been a clear trigger moment in the charging of two Roma boys with an alleged sexual assault on a local girl. Many had gathered one evening for a vigil in support of the girl.
And that might have been a good thing to do and one would be slow to attribute racism to any who joined that gathering.
But would they have gathered in the same numbers if the alleged assailants had been Ballymena-born white boys?
The fact of the accused being migrants in the town played such a strong part in local outrage that, after the expressions of sympathies for the girl, mobs turned on migrant families in the area, stormed their homes, set some of them alight, rampaged through others while mothers and children crouched for safety in dark and dusty attic spaces.
Whole families might have been incinerated. But not this time.
A loyalist mural in Bellymena (Pic: Lisa Jarvis)
As with many things in Northern Ireland we got a spectrum of response to this violence, from the callously racist to the liberal, inclusive and secular.
And, as often, this spectrum mapped onto the sectarian spectrum too that describes our historically divided society.
The hard racism was coming from working class Protestants, justifying the violence in defence of a community that had been invaded.
This attitude associated migrants with rape, much as Donald Trump does. Trump's toxic verbiage makes it easier for people to spew the same unreasoning bilge.
The problem is that 'they' get everything. 'They' are illegal. 'They' have no right to be here.
Except that when officials eventually came out to explain, there were no asylum seekers/illegal migrants in Ballymena. People coming under attack were in jobs, some of them in the health service.
Next along the spectrum comes the unionist politician who, naturally, condemns violence but seeks to explain it. For this is a unionist area.
This one says that the trouble had been boiling up for months. He or she had seen it coming, had warned that tensions were rising and had been ignored.
SDLP leader Claire Hanna in 2017 (Photo: Sam Boal/ Rollingnews.ie)
But why? And why can this reasonable sounding professional politician not be clearer about what drives community discontent?
The health minister Mike Nesbitt warned that if health service workers of foreign origin were driven out of Northern Ireland the service would collapse. That's how serious this is.
Then further along the spectrum we got the nationalist response, led most vocally by Claire Hanna MP (SDLP).
She was calling out the racism of thugs, conceding nothing to the idea that migrants have special privileges or that anything is lost to a community when brown faces start to appear on the streets.
There is however a problem of resources but you deal with that by campaigning for the government to provide, not by throwing a petrol bomb through the window of a young mother who pays the same price for bread and milk as you do yourself.
Claire took care to say that there is racism in her community too. Catholics and Nationalists can be racist. Indeed some in the Sinn Féin base, the most ardently nationalistic of all, have scoffed at their own leadership for being too sympathetic to migrants.
The old slogan, Give Ireland Back to the Irish, is, for some, no longer simply a call for British withdrawal but for migrants to be deported.
But this month the racism was coming from Protestant working class communities and that, for some Catholic Nationalists, helps to affirm the perception that they - the prods - are the bigots, that Protestant/ Loyalist bigotry is the chief problem here.
The problem was simple racism but for some it was viewed through a sectarian lens which shows that Protestants are more racist than Catholics. And there is comfort in that.
That still leaves us without a clear explanation of why some people want to drive migrant neighbours from their homes.
A man interviewed on the street in Portadown, after the violence had spread there, said that the town is no longer like it was forty years ago.
Maybe he lives such an insular life that he hasn't noticed that nowhere is like it was forty years ago.
Yes, there was a time when you didn't have to lock your front door, when you went to a neighbour to use a phone and left a few coppers on the hall table, when milk was a shilling a pint and everybody knew everybody else and everybody was white and spoke English.
But that time isn't coming back for anybody.
Perhaps such nostalgia does come with a genuinely felt sense of loss, a loss to be pitied and empathised with.
But it's not a loss that can be eased by burning the street. Nor is it a loss likely to have been felt by the teenagers who rampaged against 'dirty foreign scum' - a remark picked up from the crowd by a BBC microphone.
Nor is it a loss politicians can capitalise on, so they shouldn't try.
See More: Ballymena, Northern Ireland, Racism, Riots