I AM uncomfortably reminded of the early days of the civil rights agitation in Northern Ireland when I see new unexpected troubles emerging on the streets of Belfast.
The new protests and the reaction to them is similar in some respects — different in others — to the marches I joined myself in 1968 and ’69, demanding an end to discrimination against Catholics, a fairer local government franchise and reform of the police.
Now people are gathering on the streets with different demands. Their big concern is immigration. No one has come forward as a spokesperson for a leadership so we can only infer what they want from their slogans and their actions.
When they marched through the city centre on their first outing they sought out the mosque but didn’t find it. They chanted against Islam and they attacked shops and properties of people they assumed to be Muslims.
I doubt that anyone of Arab, Asian or African extraction would have been safe in their path.
They were met with counter protesters and the police.
That first parade was led by men waving the union jack and the Irish tricolour, and that prompted some giddy and absurd commentary that the concern about migrants had united the two communities.
But there was a little echo there of something in the early civil rights protests which also sought to be non-sectarian. They presented the argument that they were not out to revive the old quarrel over Irish unity but were simply demanding British rights for people living in a poorly governed region of the UK.
That aspiration died fairly quickly as those protests and the heavy handed state reaction morphed into an IRA revival and a generation of counter insurgency policing with armed soldiers on the streets.
That too had been as unexpected as the eruption of racism in Belfast. The IRA had basically shut up shop a decade earlier through lack of interest among the people.
So I fear what is happening because I have already seen a trajectory from amateur and enthusiastic street protest to gun battles and bombings.
On this occasion I find myself tempted to take the position of those who sneer at the protesters and urge the police on to sterner action against them.
Another lesson of experience from rioting and the policing response is that innocent people get caught up in it and versions of events are contested. Then sympathies shift. When I was 19 years old the government of Northern Ireland responded to rioting by making a six month jail sentence mandatory for anyone caught taking part.
Several of my friends were arrested by British soldiers in proximity to riots, when they were standing back watching or just trying to get home past the turmoil. And they went to jail.
Like the first civil rights parades, these protests have been met with counter protests. That is dangerous. It compounds the job of the police when they have to keep two sides apart.
One of the lessons of the Northern Ireland Troubles is that tough policing hardens attitudes. The police know now not to wade in with batons, water cannons, plastic bullets and the apparatus of riot management until they are left with no choice.
Because that will provoke even greater violence against them.
Our local policing is virtually grounded on that hard lesson. It is governed by human rights principles. The experience is there. The equipment is there. The Police Service of Northern Ireland has more experience at countering riots than any other force in the UK or Ireland. And if the protesters cross a line they will get a hammering they can hardly conceive of, especially if they mistake police action guided by human rights for softness.
The people who are under attack by racists have human rights too and our police, unlike the police in the rest of the UK and Ireland, are armed. And a threat to anyone’s life entitles an officer to meet that threat with a bullet.
As many unionists in Northern Ireland did not give credence to the demands of the civil rights movement but saw in them an old familiar beast stirring, I am tempted to regard the anti-immigration protesters as somewhere between being small minded racist thugs and the front line of a more sinister campaign organised by people who have clear objectives and a strategy.
The same question has to be answered; do we crush these protests as irrational and mischievous or do we ultimately - as happened in response to the IRA campaign - seek to find political accommodation with them.
Or are we condemned to having to endure and contain this violence until a street level movement evolves into a political party with coherent demands and a leadership than can deliver on a deal.
Many will say at this stage that you don’t negotiate with racists and thugs, but past British governments sat down with republican and loyalists paramilitary gangs that, between them, had killed thousands of people.
So yes, if talking ever seems likely to help, they will talk.
Of course it could all blow over as a flurry of summer madness.
People said that about a lot of Belfast riots too.
Malachi O’Doherty’s
latest book How To Fix
Northern Ireland is
published by Atlantic Books
