22 Jun 2011

Why violence has returned to the streets of Belfast

Chief Correspondent

As two people are seriously injured in another night of rioting in East Belfast, Channel 4 News Chief Correspondent Alex Thomson looks at why it’s happening and who’s behind it.

A protester is sihouetted in the flames of East Belfast (Getty).

The Short Strand district of East Belfast has always had a hemmed-in feel. Indeed to anyone who knows this great city the very phrase “Catholic East Belfast” has a weird ring to it.

For East Belfast is proudly, defiantly and overwhelmingly Protestant, Unionist, Loyalist.

Yet…yet then there’s this tiny area of modern Housing Executive brick terraces – Short Strand – neat and well-kept. Yet all but sealed off from the surrounding Protestant estates.

Neutral city centre and markets district to the west. The giant cranes of Harland and Wolff shipyard and the docks to the north (the once-traditional Protestant employer). And then the Newtownards Road area to the east, coming up against the walls protecting the Short Strand – the flashpoint.

Two nights ago the police said it was the worst rioting in the area for a decade. Last night? Well the same source says 700 rioters and around midnight a gunman opening up in the vague direction of police riot squads and wounding a photographer.

At times of sectarian tension there’s been trouble here down the years. It is such a time of course: July 12th is approaching and the Orange Order marches are under way, inevitably stoking tensions.

What you see in Belfast today is the rather schizoid truth of the city as she now is.

What you see in Belfast today is the rather schizoid truth of the city as she now is.

So close to the Short Strand, the would-be post-Troubles, post-sectarian new Belfast of the Waterfront concert hall; the glitzy hotels of the restored former gasworks – a place of promise and possibility. The home-city of Rory McIlroy – set to return in triumph this very day from the US Open.

Then there’s the other Belfast where the “peace-lines” – the massive walls and fences dividing unionist/loyalist from nationalist/republican neighouring housing estates. There’s no hue and cry to dismantle any walls any time soon. Far from it.

Academic studies show this city to be as rigidly physically divided along sectarian lines as at any point in its history.

Toxic mix

Stir into that toxic mix, unemployment figures and general economic hard times and you begin to see why it can all kick off so easily.

These days it is the white police vehicles of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) – but the “public order incident” exactly matches those long visited by the hulking grey armoured Landrovers of the old RUC.

Save one thing – that gunman. Such a presence at a street riot for the past two nights is unusual and would be at any time since the height of the Troubles.

A police Landrover set alight in East Belfast (Getty)

It points to paramilitary involvement. But so does the whole thing of course. On both sides of the walls in Belfast as across Northern Ireland – to riot or not to riot is a question entirely in the hands of the paramilitaries.

If they want to stamp it out they can. If they don’t, they won’t.

The curious thing on the streets of East Belfast – loyalist and republican – is that they seem to agree on something: the UVF.

Namely that the UVF and a change of management in the East Belfast UVF is the primary reason behind the past two nights of violence.

You’ll see little sign of it this morning here. The odd boarded window. Paint bomb stains on terrace houses in the Short Strand. In Northern Ireland they’ve a lot of practice in riot-clearage.

So what’s with the UVF? Well, new management wishing to flex muscles…make a mark..anxiety over possible official investigation into past atrocities…disintegration of the paramilitaries’ political party the PUP…the list is lengthy and any or all, a factor in the current aggro.