Tag Archives: Northern Ireland

Sectarianism in Belfast. What’s new?

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On July 12 this year a loyalist flute band marched past St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Donegall Street near Belfast city centre.  They stopped at that particular point by “pure chance” and started walking round in circles playing a tune known as the Famine Song, which contains the line “the famine is over, why don’t you go home?”  This song is sung by supporters of Rangers Football club in Scotland and refers to the large Irish and predominantly Catholic immigration into Scotland from the 19th century onwards.  It has been found to be both sectarian and illegal by the Scottish courts.  According to the band and their political apologists they were merely playing a pop song.  Perhaps it was again mere chance it doubles as a sectarian anthem.  Perhaps also those allegations of an attack on a cameraman filming this Orange version of the X Factor are also mistaken.

On this basis the Parades Commission, a quango established by the British government to adjudicate on contentious parades, decided the band could not take part in the loyalist parade last Saturday, which was to pass the same church.  The other bands were also only allowed to march by a single drum beat past the church.

Unionist politicians were outraged and issued a statement, along with assorted flute bands, denouncing the Parades Commission, saying they were running out of adjectives to describe it , so they gave some nouns instead – “arrogance”, “incompetence” and “general ignorance”. This statement was signed by prominent members of the Stormont Government who claimed that they could no longer let the Parades Commission do untold damage to the peace process. “Violence” would potentially ensue, they said.

So on Saturday the loyalist flute band at the centre of events marched as normal and played the normal sectarian tunes that are the staple of these ‘kick the pope’ bands, as did many of the rest. The normal sectarian insults were hurled, which are surprising only to those terminally stupid or naive.   The police did nothing that anyone could notice to prevent this.  Well, not exactly nothing: there is a picture of one policeman using a loudhailer to tell the passing bands that they were really not allowed to do what they were doing.  This robust action will no doubt be followed by the police warning burglars by megaphone that they are breaking the law when they are seen to break into someone else’s house in broad daylight. Through the Police Federation the police later complained of being caught in the crossfire, presumably between those intent on breaking the law and those who were, well, how shall we say it, wanting it upheld?

There were minor scuffles and one apparent loyalist from Scotland was arrested for running through a nationalist protest, although this was blamed by one unionist politician on a republican.

So we have a loyalist coat-trailing exercise in bigotry, defended by the most senior unionist politicians who warn of violence, which stokes up the adrenaline of the street level bigot but allows the unionist politician to deny any responsibility when the lighted match touches the blue touch paper.  The police wring their hands and the nationalist politicians talk about getting it all sorted out through talking.  You have to be very, very young not be aware that this record has been played a thousand times before.  So what’s new then?

Well what is new is supposed to be – everything!  We have a new peace process, a new political settlement, a new Government and a new coalition between the “two sides”.  Belfast has a new skyline with lots of new visitor attractions welcoming tourists, which is still a relatively new concept to Belfast.  We have new cafes and restaurants and art galleries and a new generation too young to remember ‘the troubles’ and which just wants to live in peace and has no time for this sectarian stuff.

But we have been here before.  Belfast in the 1960s was also a ‘happening’ city with a burgeoning night-life whose young generation was hailed as no longer interested in the sectarianism of the past.  The sixties brought new life, hope and light even to Belfast and not just the streets of London or San Francisco.  New housing was being created that was demolishing the slums that had no inside toilet and entries that doubled as permanent rubbish tips.  Some of this new corporation housing promised mixed estates and a new Unity Flats was built at the bottom of the Shankill Road only a couple of hundred yards, if that, from St. Patrick’s church.  Unity Flats was so called because it was to contain both Protestant and Catholic tenants, sharing the one space in harmony.

We all know, or at least have some vague idea, what happened at the end of the sixties.  That swinging decade that even moved in Belfast was very new and modern but Belfast was incapable of accepting civil rights, including fair allocation of housing and jobs and equal voting rights.  Instead it burst into violence, with Orange parades which were hyped up by unionist politicians and a police force that could not subject violent bigots to the normal restrictions of the ordinary law.  Of course this violent explosion hasn’t happened yet and in my view isn’t going to happen, not yet at least.

The mutual exhaustion of the contending political forces has not yet ended and been reversed.  The unionist leaders are attempting to exert pressure that might eventually usher in their preferred model of unionist-only rule but they are not in a position to force a confrontation that would see the British Government accede to their demands. It is not impossible that a violent eruption might occur that goes beyond unionist plans but it needs a realistic objective and the aim of getting Sinn Fein out of government has not yet become the unifying campaign theme within unionism and loyalist organisations that is required.

Instead the provocative and vitriolic sectarianism endorsed by unionist politicians in the highest offices of the Stormont administration erodes the faith of nationalists in the new deal. The approach of Sinn Fein to the recent events has been relatively muted and resembles nothing so much as the old SDLP approach which so many nationalists rejected by supporting the old (republican) Sinn Fein.  Here too however there is no unified project beyond staying in office and doing nothing to jeopardise the electoral prospects of Sinn Fein in the South.

The real republicans can attempt to take advantage of the disillusionment with the Sinn Fein reaction to the sectarian provocation and can build up their support base but what is their political project?  In so far as it simply involves a renewed armed campaign it only strengthens the ideological hold of the peace process even while more and more people, subconsciously at first, begin to wonder when exactly this process, like every other, is going to end.  The traditional republican policy isn’t credible except as a form of protest but outside of an overarching strategy this republicanism isn’t in a position yet to mobilise a large political opposition.

A large scale sectarian provocation might accelerate these trends and the planned large loyalist parade on 29 September past the same church certainly has the potential to be such a provocation.  It might at the least drive home the lessons of last Saturday if it goes ahead as the parade did then.

The condemnation by two Protestant church leaders of the sectarian behaviour of the loyalist bands shows how vulnerable the loyalists are to criticism.  It is their solutions and that of the Catholic Church that is the problem.  They both want to set the rulings of the Parades Commission as inviolable.  The Catholic Church is worse because it calls for special measures to apply when the parades pass a place of worship conveniently setting themselves up as victim, potentially privileged  protection in future while turning a blind eye to the fact that a sectarian march is a sectarian march no matter where it passes. Its vitriolic bigotry is no more acceptable a hundred yards from a church than right in front of it.

What is needed is an anti-sectarian campaign that is unafraid to name sectarianism when it sees it and is not seduced by the siren calls for equality of traditions, including mutual respect for each other’s culture.  There can be no equality for a tradition based on sectarian supremacy or respect for a culture soaked in bigotry.  Such a campaign would target not just loyalist parades but the sectarian policy creeping into housing policy and the recent discriminatory employment practices of Sinn Fein.  It would challenge the trade unions to take a principled stand and, at least in principle, should be capable of uniting much of the small left. The ULA could take the lead on this in the South by making it an issue on the floor of the Dail as the clarion call for an all-island campaign.  To do otherwise is to turn one’s back on sectarianism while claiming this as the means of opposing it.

The main task would be to rip away the protection of the current sectarian arrangements that are more and more revealing their true colours by refusing to subordinate anti-sectarianism to the demands of the peace process, however this is defined.  What sort of peace is it that allows, even sanctions, the displays of sectarian bigotry on display in Donegall Street on Saturday?

handshake and reconciliation

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The handshake between the British Queen and Sinn Fein leader Martin McGuinness is something significant even though most people in the North of Ireland have shrugged their shoulders and have only at the last minute really taken it under their notice because of the hype from the media.  Both the British State and Sinn Fein wanted it to happen for their own reasons and were more than happy that it got the media blitz that it did.

Every commentator aware of the history has remarked on the sea-change that has taken place at this diamond jubilee visit compared to that during the Queen’s silver jubilee in 1977.  At that time republicans demonstrated and rioted against her visit while today the hand of friendship has been extended.  However beneath this difference the purpose of the visit has been exactly the same on both occasions although much more successful on this one.

The veteran journalist Peter Taylor has an item on the BBC news recalling his reporting on the visit for ITV in 1977 and the authorities in that station pulling his report ten minutes before it was due to be broadcast because it exposed the reaction to the visit.  The British government was engaged in a huge propaganda effort to treat the political conflict as simply one of criminality arising from sectarian communal conflict over which the State was an impartial enforcer of peace and order.  The purpose of the Queen’s visit, Taylor says, was to present her as a “great healer of the division between the two communities”.  His report of opposition to the visit exposed this as nonsense.

It did not, and does not today, matter that everyone knew it was nonsense.  The point was to set a public agenda behind which the real strategy of repression and political intrigue could be realised.  This strategy was ultimately successful, although it took over two decades to bear fruit through the ‘peace process’, in the cause of which almost anything is justified.

Today the visit of the Queen and Sinn Fein’s very public welcome is designed to prove the aims of the 1977 visit have now been achieved.  Both she and Martin McGuinness are the bearers of reconciliation and their handshake the equivalent of signing off on an agreement that the conflict that existed in 1977 is never going to return.  The Queen can visit Ireland and there is no reason in the world to object to her presence or protest at the assertion of imperialist rule that these visits represent.

Such claims are acceptable because such acceptance betokens reconciliation.  Of course this is presented as reconciliation of a divided community, of Protestant and Catholic, and who could oppose this?  Certainly not socialists for whom the unity of Protestant and Catholic workers is a fundamental objective and which cannot happen without reconciliation.  But the reconciliation on display yesterday was not between Protestants and Catholics but between the high representatives of their current political leaderships: the Queen as head of State of the imperial power and Martin McGuinness as the highest ranking nationalist minister in a sectarian administration of this imperial rule.  What is involved is not erasing of the division but acceptance of it and promise of continuation in perpetuity.  What has been reconciled is Sinn Fein with British rule.

What events this week have shown is that far from ending sectarianism this reconciliation promises its continuation.  For this week the rotten sectarian heart of the new political arrangements in the North has been shamelessly exposed.

Conor Murphy, the recent Sinn Fein Minister for the Department for Regional Development (DRD), was found by a Fair Employment Tribunal to have engaged in unlawful religious discrimination in appointing a Catholic to Chairman of Northern Ireland Water in a case taken by one of the Protestant applicants.

The Tribunal’s judgement was scathing of Murphy.  Both the successful Catholic candidate and Murphy claimed not to have met each other before the appointment and Murphy was “quite firm” in the view he had not met the applicant.  Murphy however had previously appointed him to two public bodies while claiming not to know where he lived, although he was from Murphy’s constituency and had also been Chairman of the local Health and Social Services Trust.   The tribunal nevertheless asserted that it “is satisfied, on the balance of probabilities, that the Minister did have contact with Sean Hogan, and met him when he was Chairman of the Health Trust in Newry, and that they knew one another.  The Tribunal finds that both Sean Hogan’s and the Minister’s evidence in these respects lacks credibility.”

The Tribunal also found that “for a four year period between 2007-2011, when the Minister was in charge of DRD, there was a significant disparity between the success rates of Protestant applicants and Catholic applicants within DRD, and that a Catholic applicant was at least twice as likely to be appointed than a Protestant applicant.  Statistics for other Government Departments show a ratio at or close to 1:1.  The Tribunal is satisfied that there was a material bias against the appointment of candidates from a Protestant background within DRD.  The Tribunal is concerned that Dr McKibbin, as Permanent Secretary within DRD at the material time, and currently Head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, was not more aware of the situation.”

Even in the dark days of Unionist discrimination during the previous Stormont regime pre-1972 I can recall no case of a Minister and senior civil servant being implicated through exposure of such high profile discrimination.  It was actions like these that led to the civil rights movement and the fall of the old Stormont.  Yet there have been no words of criticism from the rest of Sinn Fein and in fact two Sinn Fein Ministerial colleagues of Murphy’s were consulted by him in making the appointment.  Murphy has continued to deny his guilt although it is impossible to believe that the evidence and judgement of the Tribunal would not be accepted by Sinn Fein if it involved Unionist discrimination against Catholics.

Sinn Fein’s claims to oppose sectarianism are badly damaged and their hypocrisy exposed.  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.  The new Stormont promises sectarian discrimination just like the old one except that both sides will now be at it. The silence of the representatives of Unionism is deafening.  They knew that this is what they were agreeing to by accepting Sinn Fein in office because that is what being ‘in government’ is all about.  Small and relatively powerless local administrations do nothing but administer bureaucracy and distribute the spoils of office.  By their silence it is quite clear that Unionists will view the actions of Sinn Fein as licence to do the same.  The benefit to Catholics of Sinn Fein discrimination will be licence for Unionism to discriminate against them.

Sectarianism is to be more secure because everyone will be at it except of course that the whole point of discrimination is to arrive at an unfair and unbalanced outcome.  Equality of discrimination makes no sense at all and will be proved in the attempt to achieve it.  It is not an inherently stable proposition.  However the attempt to achieve it means that if there is to be real opposition to sectarianism and discrimination the unity of the working class becomes a more obvious need because both stand immediately to benefit.  Let Sinn Fein and the British State become reconciled to the current arrangements; the true cause of reconciliation belongs to those opposed to religious discrimination. By becoming ‘friends’ it must be made clear to working people of both religions that the Queen and the Minister are both on the other side.