My first visit to Belfast was a revelation. I was young, I had never been anywhere even remotely dangerous, and Belfast at that time was very dangerous indeed. We stayed at the Europa, which was where all the journalists stayed, and which then had the dubious reputation of being the most bombed hotel in Europe. I had never seen a gun before, and I was shocked to be searched by armed men. I was even more shocked at how quickly I got used to it. It rained for most of the time we were there and I was glad to get back home.
Last year I went to Belfast again, and although I knew that things had improved since the Good Friday Agreement, only seeing it at first hand could really demonstrate by how much. The guns had gone, and the Europa (where we did not stay this time) just looked like any other large hotel. It was easy to believe that all was well, and would continue to get better.
Easy, but wrong.
Contrary to our fond illusions, the Good Friday Agreement did not put a full stop to violence in Northern Ireland, and there have been incidents throughout the period since. However, for the moment let’s just briefly concentrate on the last few months. In October a prison officer was shot dead as he drove to work and a man in north Belfast who had apparently been warned to leave was shot six times and killed. In December the Finucane Report was published, and in the same month the City Council decided, by the democratic process known as getting a majority of people in the room to vote for the motion, not to fly the Union flag over Belfast City Hall on every day of the year. This was followed by three weeks of rioting by ‘loyalists’ in which MPs and councillors were threatened and attacked, and shops and businesses in the city saw disastrous falls in trade at what should have been the most profitable time of the year.
Then on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year an attempt was made to kill a police officer and his family by means of a bomb attached to his car, and on New Year’s Eve a bomb was left outside houses near Armagh Police Station and families in west Belfast were evacuated after a ‘viable’ pipe bomb was thrown at a house. Riots have continued, and several days into January petrol bombs are still being thrown at police.
Watching from this side of the water, and having lived through the period of the Troubles with all that that entailed, it’s hard not to be filled with a sort of despair. Perhaps this is why coverage of events in Belfast is very uneven, and much of it almost has the flavour of being about a foreign country. Occasionally it’s the lead story, but sometimes it isn’t mentioned at all. One is bound to wonder whether this would be the same if these things were happening in London, or if those involved were from estates and inner cities in Manchester and Liverpool? Or would politicians, journalists and commentators have been falling over themselves to offer insight, initiatives, opinions and condemnation?
It’s true that there may be all sorts of actions in the pipeline. But, if so, they have either been not announced or not reported, and there must be a suspicion that for much (though not all) of the political village Northern Ireland is an inconvenient problem which the Good Friday Agreement should have sorted out. After all, how can we preach to the rest of the world about how to deal with their civil wars if the remnants of our own are acknowledged as unresolved?
This impression is reinforced by news (unreported over here) that the former Commissioner of Victims and Survivors, Mike Nesbitt (currently leader of the Ulster Unionists at Stormont) last week accused the government of having ‘no new ideas’ for dealing with the legacy of decades of terrorism and violence, whilst the Alliance’s Naomi Long MP (herself the recipient of death threats during the flag riots) is critical of the Westminster government’s failure to hold the all-party talks on legacy issues called for by all parties at Stormont in 2011.
Strong feelings on both sides of the argument are bound up with deep-rooted issues of identity, something which the 2011 census asked about for the first time. The loyalist community fears that it is in decline, with some people believing that its culture and history are in danger of being lost. There are also parts of the republican community which have never quite worked out that, however much a united Ireland lives on in the heart, once the people have spoken through the ballot box the game is largely up. The view (not uncommon in an unsympathetic Britain) that both cultures are singularly unattractive and neither would be missed does a disservice to law-abiding people on both sides whilst failing to do justice to either.
Northern Ireland is enduring the same austerity measures as the rest of the UK, but it is doing so in a climate in which a violent and divided past is still relevant. We know that poverty can feed civil unrest, and we know also that violence can never be condoned and is always the responsibility of those who commit it, and that governments cannot appear to be rewarding riot and murder, but in Northern Ireland the situation is complicated by a shared history which we ignore at our peril.
We have seen in many other places in the world that reconciliation after civil war is a long, difficult road. Strategies for moving forwards are hard to find, and often even harder to implement. Recent events in Ulster may be just a blip, or they may be something worse, but either way they merit a more considered and constructive response from us than they’ve had in 2012. Let’s hope for all our sakes that they get it in 2013.