Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: After the riots, unionist mealy-mouthed condemnation doubled back to ritual Sinn Féin bashing

A firework explodes at the peace line at Lanark Way in west Belfast. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison).
A firework explodes at the peace line at Lanark Way in west Belfast. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison). A firework explodes at the peace line at Lanark Way in west Belfast. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison).

It was not war reporting. Those who went on to ‘proper’ wars occasionally refer back, a few joking about being most afraid when they were younger and new to it, on some street between the Shankill and the Falls.

Some have always suggested that reporting on riots taught them very little. It’s probably safe to say that the oldest hands here would agree.

The most useful lessons were ‘Try to find a place where you can see “both sides”, keep your head down, and never stand beside the police.’ Social media and technology may have taught reporters new tactics and changed rioters’ schedules. What has not changed is that those who shouted loudest in advance stayed safely at home while boys burned buses and attacked police.

There was inspiration in this paper having reporter Bimpe Archer interview historian Eamon Phoenix on how Belfast street violence keeps happening in the same places. New-fangled Lanark Way inherits a patch storm-tossed since the mid-19th century. Polemicist and also historian Brian Feeney pointed up the moment when loyalists breached the gates at ‘the most dangerous interface in the north’ between Shankill and Clonard. Some reported that moment in the passive tense. So the gates ‘were breached’ by a blazing car and the ‘narrative’ became the less honest tale of one side as bad as the other.

When youths gathered on the nationalist side, the best reporting noted that adults were there trying to discourage them while nothing of the sort happened among the loyalist youths. The sheer numbers and the daily toll could not be glossed over or smoothed out.

These pages and some elsewhere have tried to cover the waterfront by way of the scenes themselves. Plus context, the background that explains seemingly random mayhem. What is the point? What’s it all about? Unionist rhetoric inflaming loyalists, though it might be more accurate to say daring them to cause disorder at the very least, is old news that needed to be reported now as much as ever. To go by initial appearances, what remain of the biggest loyalist paramilitary groups refused initially to play the game.

It is probably not worth investigating whether or not those paramilitary remnants are indeed represented by the ‘LCC’, the Loyalist Communities Council. Almost every loyalist/unionist ‘collective’ to date, often cover for clueless politicians, has had an empty, short history.

A few questions hang in the air. Were some hidden hands behind loyalist petrol-bomb throwers hitting back at the PSNI, because the police had at last begun to make serious inroads, complete with arrests, into paramilitary crime? And why did the rioting start in Derry, rather than Belfast or east Antrim?

Belfast Telegraph photographer Kevin Scott wrote well about being attacked by bigots; the riddle that these are people who complain about not being reported, his waving earlier to people he knows on the Shankill, resolving to head back there as soon as possible. He also had the grace to say that although he’d covered rioting before this he was glad to be too young to have gone through the Troubles.

Some things were different; the first crack of a live bullet from an IRA gun, the thunk of a rubber ‘baton round’. Hard to argue police should face petrol bombs without a strong defence but the latest form of rubber and plastic bullets? Their history is a grievous list of deaths and raw injuries.

Nobody wins in riots. Unionist mealy-mouthed condemnation doubled back to ritual SF-bashing. The late Prince Philip’s contributions to the benighted state of Northern Ireland were that he doggedly shook the hand of Martin McGuinness and that his death gave unionists desperately needed distraction from the consequences of their own incompetence and dishonesty. If he’d heard the pious suggestion that the place held a special interest for him, he might have loosed one of his princely bloopers. It might even have included the word ‘Paddies’.