WHEN I was a kid we used to have a bonfire at the top of our street, then the heat from it cracked a pensioner's window so it was moved to a nearby field, there was no 'negotiations' around moving location it was just moved.
Eventually our bonfire was decommissioned in favour of street parties and fun days that in turn became what we now know as Féile an Phobail.
The bonfire in our street wasn't a massive hundred foot structure of pellets and tyres, the like of which we associate with the Eleventh night, but a pile of unwanted rubbish, furniture and scabby old mattresses, flea bites were common place among those collecting this contaminated flammable material.
Young people love bonfires, they love burning stuff, it's destructive and fun and when adults relinquish responsibility to crowds of youths they rarely make good choices.
As any mother of teenagers knows if you were to let them go through life doing whatever they want the result would be carnage fuelled on a diet of Red Bull.
The bonfire in our street was on August 8, the anniversary of internment.
I can't remember bonfires on August 15 for the Feast of the Assumption, my Da says he remembers them when he was a child but he's in his 70s, so just how this has became 'fashionable' again I've no idea.
I'm pretty sure the bonfires of my father's childhood didn't have election posters and union flags, nor would they have been built in the middle of a main road so an ambulance crew had to ask nicely could they please drive around it.
What a religious feast has to do with burning Sinn Féin election posters is a mystery to me.
Rather than an 'act of defiance' against the establishment as the Derry bonfire was described, it appears this is more of an attempt to emulate loyalists who must have looked to nationalists youths as though they were having loads of craic.
Compliance with schemes to monitor and reduce the pollution and offence caused by loyalist bonfires - once lauded as a solution to the problem with offers of financial grants for compliance - is reducing each year.
Loyalist communities are shunning restraint in favour gravity defying structures full of tyres and covered in offensive symbols. Bonfires in both communities are getting bigger rather than better.
One bonfire in east Belfast caused an entire street to be evacuated in 2015, a massive fire in the Shankill estate resulted in a number of families losing their homes and almost their lives this year.
The Derry bonfire was anti social by location alone, likewise a stolen car was set on fire at the Divis bonfire earlier this month.
A girl was knocked down in a hit and run at a bonfire in east Belfast, a man with a crossbow was pictured at the Manor Street fire and there's a lively film doing the rounds of a mass brawl at the New Lodge bonfire that neighbours say went on until 2am.
Some dissident republican, anti agreement republicans, call them whatever you want have now associated themselves with the fires. While there is an argument that they are providing 'political influence' and speaking with young people associated with the fires they should look at how that's worked out in loyalist communities before taking on such a no win situation.
In reality all they are doing is helping facilitate anti social behaviour because the young people building the fires are no more interested in their opinion than in PC Plod from Grosvenor Road station's input.
The loyalist flag protests are an example of what happens when you give bored young people an outlet. It's much harder to put the genie back in the bottle than it is to take it out.
Poverty is no excuse for wrecking your own area with a fire surrounded by drunk and drugged up youths and adults who would rather be popular than take responsibility.
Facilitating these fires is equivalent of adults going into the off licence for underage drinkers, and those who do need to wise up and grow up, nothing political in being a prat.
Meanwhile, a working class young man who rather than use his social circumstances as excuse to engage in anti social behaviour and instead dedicated his life to sport was this week badly wronged.
Michael Conlan is the pride of west Belfast, one of the most successful boxers to come out of the city, he has done us proud in both previous Olympic and Commonwealth games.
He earned his chance to fight for a medal, it was wrongly denied him and he's rightly angry as are all of us who watched that fight.
Cheated not defeated, he comes home a hero in our eyes and on that all sides of the community are in agreement.
