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Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Legacy of past hangs over anti-immigrant violence in Northern Ireland
By Padraic Halpin BELFAST (Reuters) -Bullets and bombs were a part of life in the Belfast that Raied al-Wazzan moved to from Iraq in 1990, but he never felt threatened as a member of one of the divided region's tiny ethnic minorities. But after a week when masked anti-immigrant rioters attacked police and set the homes of migrants on fire, fear has set in. "There are certain areas I cannot go by myself or even drive through," said Al-Wazzan, the vice-chair of the Northern Ireland Council for Racial Equality, an umbrella group for a number of organisations representing ethnic minorities. "I used to live in some of these areas, but today it's not safe for me or (my) family or people who have a different colour of skin." The eruption of what police described as mob-led "racist thuggery" is particularly dangerous in Northern Ireland due to its legacy of sectarian violence and lingering role of paramilitary groups with a history of stoking street disorder. More than 3,600 people were killed between 1968 and 1998 in a conflict between mainly Catholic Irish nationalists seeking Irish unity, predominantly Protestant pro-British "loyalists" wanting to stay in the United Kingdom and the British military. But while segregation along sectarian lines remains common, particularly in housing and education, the number of recorded race hate crimes is now double that of sectarian offences, which they surpassed almost a decade ago, police data shows. "The last week's events have not come out of nowhere," said Patrick Corrigan, the local director of Amnesty International, who knew of women and children fleeing to their attic to breathe through a skylight when rioters lit fires downstairs. "We have a serious problem of endemic racist violence, at times fuelled by paramilitary organisations, a particularly sinister element in this part of the world where you have masked men who have recourse to violence to try to tell people where they're allowed to live or where they're not," Corrigan said. While the 1998 Good Friday Agreement led to the disarming of the main Irish Republican and loyalist militant groups, splinter factions endure. Such groups continue to exert control over some communities through intimidation, financial extortion and drug dealing, and have been involved in racially motivated attacks, the body that monitors paramilitary activity said earlier this year. Corrigan said migrants within WhatsApp groups he is part of were "clearly terrified", reluctant to leave their homes to go to work and their children afraid to walk to school. That sentiment is shared by Nathalie Donnelly, who runs a weekly English class as part of the UNISON trade union's migrant worker project. Half her students were now too scared to attend, she said. "I think we are just one petrol bomb away from a serious loss of life," Corrigan said. 'CLEARLY TERRIFIED' The violence flared first and was most intense in Ballymena after two 14-year-old boys were arrested and appeared in court, accused of a serious sexual assault on a teenage girl in the town. The charges were read via a Romanian interpreter to the boys, whose lawyer told the court that they denied them. Ballymena, 45 kilometres (28 miles) from Belfast, is a mainly Protestant working-class town that was once the powerbase of Ian Paisley, the fiercely pro-British preacher-politician who died in 2014. Most of the other areas where anti-immigrant violence spread last week - Larne, Newtownabbey, Portadown and Coleraine - were similar, mostly Protestant towns. At the outset of the "Troubles", some Catholics and Protestants were violently forced from their homes in areas where they were in the minority, and sectarian attacks remained common through three decades of violence and the imperfect peace that followed. "Sectarianism and racism have never been very different from each other," said Dominic Bryan, a professor at Queens University Belfast who researches group identity and political violence. "It doesn't totally surprise me that as society changes and Northern Ireland has become a very different society than it was even 30 years ago, that some of this 'out grouping' shifts," Bryan said, adding that such prejudices could also be seen among Irish nationalists. Immigration has historically been low in Northern Ireland, where the years of conflict bred an insular society unused to assimilating outsiders. There are other factors at play too, said Bryan. The towns involved all have big economic problems, sub-standard housing and rely on healthcare and industries such as meat packing and manufacturing that need an increasing migrant workforce. "The people around here, they're literally at a boiling point," said Ballymena resident Neil Brammeld. The town's diverse culture was welcomed and everybody got along, he said, but for problems with "a select few". "The people have been complaining for months and months leading up to this and the police are nowhere to be seen." While around 6% of people in the province were born abroad, with those belonging to ethnic minority groups about half that, the foreign-born population in Ballymena is now much higher, in line with the UK average of 16%. Northern Ireland does not have specific hate crime legislation, although some race-related incidents can be prosecuted as part of wider laws. Justice Minister Naomi Long pledged last year to boost those existing provisions but said the power-sharing government would not have enough time to introduce a standalone hate crime bill before the next election in 2027. While five successive nights of violence mostly came to an end on Saturday, the effects are still being felt. "I'm determined that I'm not going to be chased away from my home," said Ivanka Antova, an organiser of an anti-racism rally in Belfast on Saturday, who moved to Belfast from Bulgaria 15 years ago. "Racism will not win."
The Star
8 hours ago
- Politics
- The Star
Legacy of past hangs over anti-immigrant violence in Northern Ireland
BELFAST (Reuters) -Bullets and bombs were a part of life in the Belfast that Raied al-Wazzan moved to from Iraq in 1990, but he never felt threatened as a member of one of the divided region's tiny ethnic minorities. But after a week when masked anti-immigrant rioters attacked police and set the homes of migrants on fire, fear has set in. "There are certain areas I cannot go by myself or even drive through," said Al-Wazzan, the vice-chair of the Northern Ireland Council for Racial Equality, an umbrella group for a number of organisations representing ethnic minorities. "I used to live in some of these areas, but today it's not safe for me or (my) family or people who have a different colour of skin." The eruption of what police described as mob-led "racist thuggery" is particularly dangerous in Northern Ireland due to its legacy of sectarian violence and lingering role of paramilitary groups with a history of stoking street disorder. More than 3,600 people were killed between 1968 and 1998 in a conflict between mainly Catholic Irish nationalists seeking Irish unity, predominantly Protestant pro-British "loyalists" wanting to stay in the United Kingdom and the British military. But while segregation along sectarian lines remains common, particularly in housing and education, the number of recorded race hate crimes is now double that of sectarian offences, which they surpassed almost a decade ago, police data shows. "The last week's events have not come out of nowhere," said Patrick Corrigan, the local director of Amnesty International, who knew of women and children fleeing to their attic to breathe through a skylight when rioters lit fires downstairs. "We have a serious problem of endemic racist violence, at times fuelled by paramilitary organisations, a particularly sinister element in this part of the world where you have masked men who have recourse to violence to try to tell people where they're allowed to live or where they're not," Corrigan said. While the 1998 Good Friday Agreement led to the disarming of the main Irish Republican and loyalist militant groups, splinter factions endure. Such groups continue to exert control over some communities through intimidation, financial extortion and drug dealing, and have been involved in racially motivated attacks, the body that monitors paramilitary activity said earlier this year. Corrigan said migrants within WhatsApp groups he is part of were "clearly terrified", reluctant to leave their homes to go to work and their children afraid to walk to school. That sentiment is shared by Nathalie Donnelly, who runs a weekly English class as part of the UNISON trade union's migrant worker project. Half her students were now too scared to attend, she said. "I think we are just one petrol bomb away from a serious loss of life," Corrigan said. 'CLEARLY TERRIFIED' The violence flared first and was most intense in Ballymena after two 14-year-old boys were arrested and appeared in court, accused of a serious sexual assault on a teenage girl in the town. The charges were read via a Romanian interpreter to the boys, whose lawyer told the court that they denied them. Ballymena, 45 kilometres (28 miles) from Belfast, is a mainly Protestant working-class town that was once the powerbase of Ian Paisley, the fiercely pro-British preacher-politician who died in 2014. Most of the other areas where anti-immigrant violence spread last week - Larne, Newtownabbey, Portadown and Coleraine - were similar, mostly Protestant towns. At the outset of the "Troubles", some Catholics and Protestants were violently forced from their homes in areas where they were in the minority, and sectarian attacks remained common through three decades of violence and the imperfect peace that followed. "Sectarianism and racism have never been very different from each other," said Dominic Bryan, a professor at Queens University Belfast who researches group identity and political violence. "It doesn't totally surprise me that as society changes and Northern Ireland has become a very different society than it was even 30 years ago, that some of this 'out grouping' shifts," Bryan said, adding that such prejudices could also be seen among Irish nationalists. Immigration has historically been low in Northern Ireland, where the years of conflict bred an insular society unused to assimilating outsiders. There are other factors at play too, said Bryan. The towns involved all have big economic problems, sub-standard housing and rely on healthcare and industries such as meat packing and manufacturing that need an increasing migrant workforce. "The people around here, they're literally at a boiling point," said Ballymena resident Neil Brammeld. The town's diverse culture was welcomed and everybody got along, he said, but for problems with "a select few". "The people have been complaining for months and months leading up to this and the police are nowhere to be seen." While around 6% of people in the province were born abroad, with those belonging to ethnic minority groups about half that, the foreign-born population in Ballymena is now much higher, in line with the UK average of 16%. Northern Ireland does not have specific hate crime legislation, although some race-related incidents can be prosecuted as part of wider laws. Justice Minister Naomi Long pledged last year to boost those existing provisions but said the power-sharing government would not have enough time to introduce a standalone hate crime bill before the next election in 2027. While five successive nights of violence mostly came to an end on Saturday, the effects are still being felt. "I'm determined that I'm not going to be chased away from my home," said Ivanka Antova, an organiser of an anti-racism rally in Belfast on Saturday, who moved to Belfast from Bulgaria 15 years ago. "Racism will not win." (Reporting by Padraic Halpin and Amanda Ferguson; Editing by and Alex Richardson)
Straits Times
10 hours ago
- Politics
- Straits Times
Legacy of past hangs over anti-immigrant violence in Northern Ireland
FILE PHOTO: Demonstrators hold a banner as they gather for a rally calling for an end to violence and hate, following days of riots over an alleged sexual assault in Ballymena on a teenage girl, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, June 14, 2025. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne/File Photo FILE PHOTO: Demonstrators hold a banner as they gather for a rally calling for an end to violence and hate, following days of riots over an alleged sexual assault on a teenage girl, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, June 14, 2025. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne/File Photo FILE PHOTO: Signs reading: \"Locals live here\", are displayed on a residential house, following a protest over an alleged sexual assault on a local teenage girl, in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, June 12, 2025. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne/File Photo FILE PHOTO: Demonstrators face a group of riot police vehicles while they deploy water cannons as riots continue in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, June 11, 2025. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne/File Photo BELFAST - Bullets and bombs were a part of life in the Belfast that Raied al-Wazzan moved to from Iraq in 1990, but he never felt threatened as a member of one of the divided region's tiny ethnic minorities. But after a week when masked anti-immigrant rioters attacked police and set the homes of migrants on fire, fear has set in. "There are certain areas I cannot go by myself or even drive through," said Al-Wazzan, the vice-chair of the Northern Ireland Council for Racial Equality, an umbrella group for a number of organisations representing ethnic minorities. "I used to live in some of these areas, but today it's not safe for me or (my) family or people who have a different colour of skin." The eruption of what police described as mob-led "racist thuggery" is particularly dangerous in Northern Ireland due to its legacy of sectarian violence and lingering role of paramilitary groups with a history of stoking street disorder. More than 3,600 people were killed between 1968 and 1998 in a conflict between mainly Catholic Irish nationalists seeking Irish unity, predominantly Protestant pro-British "loyalists" wanting to stay in the United Kingdom and the British military. But while segregation along sectarian lines remains common, particularly in housing and education, the number of recorded race hate crimes is now double that of sectarian offences, which they surpassed almost a decade ago, police data shows. "The last week's events have not come out of nowhere," said Patrick Corrigan, the local director of Amnesty International, who knew of women and children fleeing to their attic to breathe through a skylight when rioters lit fires downstairs. "We have a serious problem of endemic racist violence, at times fuelled by paramilitary organisations, a particularly sinister element in this part of the world where you have masked men who have recourse to violence to try to tell people where they're allowed to live or where they're not," Corrigan said. While the 1998 Good Friday Agreement led to the disarming of the main Irish Republican and loyalist militant groups, splinter factions endure. Such groups continue to exert control over some communities through intimidation, financial extortion and drug dealing, and have been involved in racially motivated attacks, the body that monitors paramilitary activity said earlier this year. Corrigan said migrants within WhatsApp groups he is part of were "clearly terrified", reluctant to leave their homes to go to work and their children afraid to walk to school. That sentiment is shared by Nathalie Donnelly, who runs a weekly English class as part of the UNISON trade union's migrant worker project. Half her students were now too scared to attend, she said. "I think we are just one petrol bomb away from a serious loss of life," Corrigan said. 'CLEARLY TERRIFIED' The violence flared first and was most intense in Ballymena after two 14-year-old boys were arrested and appeared in court, accused of a serious sexual assault on a teenage girl in the town. The charges were read via a Romanian interpreter to the boys, whose lawyer told the court that they denied them. Ballymena, 45 kilometres (28 miles) from Belfast, is a mainly Protestant working-class town that was once the powerbase of Ian Paisley, the fiercely pro-British preacher-politician who died in 2014. Most of the other areas where anti-immigrant violence spread last week - Larne, Newtownabbey, Portadown and Coleraine - were similar, mostly Protestant towns. At the outset of the "Troubles", some Catholics and Protestants were violently forced from their homes in areas where they were in the minority, and sectarian attacks remained common through three decades of violence and the imperfect peace that followed. "Sectarianism and racism have never been very different from each other," said Dominic Bryan, a professor at Queens University Belfast who researches group identity and political violence. "It doesn't totally surprise me that as society changes and Northern Ireland has become a very different society than it was even 30 years ago, that some of this 'out grouping' shifts," Bryan said, adding that such prejudices could also be seen among Irish nationalists. Immigration has historically been low in Northern Ireland, where the years of conflict bred an insular society unused to assimilating outsiders. There are other factors at play too, said Bryan. The towns involved all have big economic problems, sub-standard housing and rely on healthcare and industries such as meat packing and manufacturing that need an increasing migrant workforce. "The people around here, they're literally at a boiling point," said Ballymena resident Neil Brammeld. The town's diverse culture was welcomed and everybody got along, he said, but for problems with "a select few". "The people have been complaining for months and months leading up to this and the police are nowhere to be seen." While around 6% of people in the province were born abroad, with those belonging to ethnic minority groups about half that, the foreign-born population in Ballymena is now much higher, in line with the UK average of 16%. Northern Ireland does not have specific hate crime legislation, although some race-related incidents can be prosecuted as part of wider laws. Justice Minister Naomi Long pledged last year to boost those existing provisions but said the power-sharing government would not have enough time to introduce a standalone hate crime bill before the next election in 2027. While five successive nights of violence mostly came to an end on Saturday, the effects are still being felt. "I'm determined that I'm not going to be chased away from my home," said Ivanka Antova, an organiser of an anti-racism rally in Belfast on Saturday, who moved to Belfast from Bulgaria 15 years ago. "Racism will not win." REUTERS Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
New York Times
11-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The Americans Who Ran Guns for the I.R.A.
When it comes to understanding the Irish, it helps to take the long view. The Ulster Plantation of 1609, intended to replace native Catholic Irish residents with Protestant settlers from Scotland and England, initiated a conflict that has never quite ended. And in 1690, the British won a decisive victory over Irish Catholics that Ulster's unionists still celebrate annually as if they've just won the World Cup. More recent divisions in Northern Ireland date to the 1921 treaty that ended the Irish war of independence and granted Ireland status as a 'free state,' rather than a republic — allowing Britain to retain six of Ulster's nine counties. In 'The Next One Is for You,' an informative and well-researched account of the Troubles — the lenient name attached to a bitter internecine struggle — and their reverberations in America, the New York Times reporter Ali Watkins describes the treaty as a 'devil's bargain.' Whether it was demonic or all that was possible at the time, the treaty triggered a brief, brutal civil war that scared Ireland for generations and sent many of the defeated Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) fighters to the United States. One-party rule by Ulster unionists, Watkins writes, left Catholics with 'few jobs, poor housing and threadbare resources.' In 1968, inspired in part by the American civil rights movement, Catholics initiated nonviolent protests to end discrimination and to put a stop to disenfranchising gerrymandering. The reaction was swift. The local police force stood by while protesters were assaulted and beaten by unionist mobs, who carried out violent attacks against Belfast's Catholic neighborhoods. A radical faction of the I.R.A. known as the Provos dedicated themselves to expelling the British through armed struggle. These events stirred a segment of Irish Americans to take more than a sentimental interest in post-treaty Ireland. The feeling was especially strong in working-class neighborhoods in New York and Philadelphia. In the United States at large, Watkins writes, 'the steady flight of I.R.A. veterans to America had effectively created a shadowy, satellite brigade of Irish Republicans within the country's sprawling Irish diaspora.' Watkins does a thorough job of pulling back the curtain on the principals behind a pro-I.R.A. group called the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID), figures like Daniel Duffy, a mechanic, and Hughie Breen, a Philadelphia bar owner. Ostensibly intended to raise money to support families in the North, NORAID instead largely spent the funds arming the I.R.A. Sympathetic longshoremen and customs officials saw to it that NORAID was able to smuggle semiautomatics into Ulster. The guns triggered a 'ballistic escalation' so potent that the Armalite became the Provos' symbol. Instead of peacekeeping, the British Army devoted itself to crushing the I.R.A. On Jan. 30, 1972, British paratroopers in Derry killed 14 unarmed Catholic protesters, intensifying the conflict exponentially. For the I.R.A., this 'Bloody Sunday' rallied support. 'The surge of interest that followed,' Watkins posits, 'would pay dividends to NORAID for years to come.' In a meeting with President Richard Nixon in 1971, the British prime minister Edward Heath raised the issue of American support for the I.R.A. NORAID could no longer be ignored, and the U.S. Department of Justice pursued a full-scale investigation. Watkins follows in great detail the cat-and-mouse game that ensued between the feds and NORAID. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the F.B.I. were 'stacked with Irish American agents,' but it did the conspirators little good. A sting by an undercover agent was a severe blow. Faced with the 1976 conviction of its operatives in federal court, NORAID faded into the background, 'an obsolete ghost.' At times, in her thorough account of the grass-roots support for the I.R.A., Watkins strays into the weeds. She also offers a separate narrative of women volunteers in the organization, a change in focus only sometimes consequential to the fate of NORAID — and, at other times, a jarring diversion. Watkins credits NORAID as a 'cultural center for huge swaths of Irish America.' In New York and Philadelphia, 'it became a ubiquitous part of daily life' and 'a household name at most Irish American dinner tables.' This inflation of NORAID's prominence is misleading. Support for NORAID from the 30 million Americans claiming Irish ancestry was puny. Watkins argues that 'while they may have been proportionally modest, NORAID members made up for it in enthusiasm.' But in fact NORAID was never a household word. And if 'huge swaths' had actually contributed, NORAID could have raised the I.R.A. from a small guerrilla force to a military powerhouse. When peace came, it wasn't at the barrel of a gun. The main architect was John Hume, a schoolteacher from Derry and founder of the Social Democratic and Labour Party whose commitment to nonviolence was unwavering over decades. Undeterred by threats from extremists, Hume pursued American involvement in reaching a peaceful solution. From the late 1970s, he cultivated a close relationship with Irish America's quartet of political heavyweights, the 'Four Horsemen': New York Gov. Hugh Carey, Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Ted Kennedy, and Speaker Tip O'Neill. Eventually, President Bill Clinton broke with the State Department's traditional loyalty to the British and appointed a special envoy, who in 1998 brokered the Good Friday agreement that ended the fighting. By the time the Troubles ended, more than 3,500 people had been killed — a significant portion of them innocent civilians. Thousands more were physically or psychologically wounded. 'The long war had taken its toll,' Watkins observes in her well-told account, and the effects were suffered 'by ordinary people.' For now, peace holds in Northern Ireland. Britain's decision to leave the E.U. added an unexpected complication, but the empire's sway over Ireland is a thing of the past. In some quarters, there is gathering momentum for reunification. To quote Seamus Heaney, it seems possible that this time 'hope and history rhyme.'
