One February afternoon in 1992, two UDA sectarian killers burst into Seán Graham bookmakers on Belfast’s Lower Ormeau Road and sprayed the place with gunfire. Five customers died. Seven others were injured. All of them were Catholics with an ethnic allegiance to the Irish Republic. The youngest to die was 15 years old. In that same city last Saturday, self-styled “Irish patriots” waved the Tricolour shoulder-to-shoulder with Union Jack-waving loyalists under the false flag of “protest” against immigration. The rally soon descended into Islamophobic and racist rioting. The Irish flag’s green and orange were sewn together while the white, for peace, got trampled to shreds. This was a version of a united Ireland that never featured in any vision of this island’s reunification.
According to police, loyalist paramilitary figures were involved in orchestrating the violence. The so-called protest headed for the Lower Ormeau Road in the south of the city where it was repelled by local residents – real heroes – but not before some loyalists made triumphalist gun-shooting gestures towards the Seán Graham shop. That night, according to newspaper reports, the “Irish patriots” went drinking with their new loyalist buddies in a Sandy Row pub. Among the gathering was a UDA man who had been questioned by police about the 1992 sectarian murders in the bookies. The sight of “Billy boys” and “Fenians” uniting in a band of brothers must have been stomach-churning for the North’s nationalists and unionists still haunted by the horrors of the sectarian and ethnocidal Troubles.
To those of us watching this moronic marriage of convenience, there is one consolation. Thieves fall out. Only last month, some people in that bar on Saturday night would have been celebrating the burning of the Irish flag on 11th night bonfires. Yet this is poor consolation for the new-Irish and asylum seekers who have been terrorised, assaulted and deprived of their livelihoods in this latest rendition of Irish ethnic cleansing. Since Saturday, rioters have destroyed several Muslim-owned business premises in Belfast and were only prevented by police from storming a mosque. Some of those involved yelled at women wearing Islamic head coverings: “Jesus loves you. F – k Islam.” For “Irish patriots” it seems, religious bigotry is perfectly acceptable as long as they are not the butt of it.
That this alliance of green and orange sectarian supremacists may be a temporary foolishness in the lazy days of August is scant consolation too for anyone who believes in the power of logical persuasion. Just try reminding those “Irish patriots” that the 1916 Proclamation guaranteed “religious and civil liberty” in the envisaged Irish state for which its signatories died. Try telling them how the loyalist Shankill Butchers used to cruise nationalist parts of Belfast to abduct and torture Catholics before killing them with meat cleavers, hatchets and shovels, and how the Lord Chief Justice, Turlough O’Donnell – the father of the Republic’s current Chief Justice – declared at their trial that their crimes were “a lasting monument to sectarian bigotry”. Try telling them how, as recently as 2021, their loyalist pals suspended their support for the Belfast Agreement, the foundation for a potential all-island Ireland where they might be compatriots someday and go drinking together in a shared country.
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Nor have unionists forgotten the IRA’s sectarian Kingsmill massacre in 1976 when 10 Protestant workers were shot dead because of their religion or how republican paramilitaries machine-gunned an Orange Hall in Tullyvallen, Co Armagh, leaving five Orangemen dead and seven others wounded. In the 26 years since the signing of the Belfast Agreement, politicians in Belfast, Dublin and London have mostly kept mute about the biggest killer in the midst of the Troubles – sectarianism. Their reticence echoed Basil Fawlty’s philosophy: “Don’t mention the war.” But hatred does not meekly go away. It goes looking for a fresh target.
Gullibility is the new global weapon of mass destruction. Elon Musk, a purveyor of inflammatory untruths, owns what is probably the world’s most influential social media platform, X, and uses it to stoke distrust in democracy. He has predicted civil war in Britain and once declared that the then taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, hated the Irish people. Assistant Commissioner Michael McElgunn, who runs the Garda unit responsible for State security, has warned that foreign governments, such as Vladimir Putin’s, are perpetuating antipathy to the Irish Government in support of extremist groups here. Conor Gallagher, this newspaper’s crime and security correspondent, has reported extensively on US neo-Nazis’ links with Irish keyboard warriors who have taken to the streets with torches lit by lies.
A Red C poll for the Electoral Commission has returned the startling findings that 22 per cent of respondents believed the Government is using the immigration of people of colour to beef up numbers of “obedient voters”. The same proportion believed that experimental new drugs and technologies are being tested on an unsuspecting public. The survey, which was conducted after the local and European elections in June, found that voters for Independent Ireland, Aontú and Sinn Féin were most likely to believe in conspiracy theories.
It is tempting to dismiss the relatively small number of individuals who are fomenting hatred as spy states’ stooges but their growing influence is too ominous for such snooty indulgence. Brain-washing is working. Fascism is on the march. It is being led by individuals for whom Sinn Féin is too moderate and for whom, therefore, Sinn Féin’s old enemy is their new best friend.
The Government’s response is to ban the wearing of face coverings. It’s another Band Aid to mask the symptoms. What it should be doing urgently is legally classifying social media platforms as publishers with all the inherent obligations; introducing a fitness test for media ownership; fast-forwarding hate speech legislation; adding critical thinking and media literacy to the school curriculum; and funding access to print and online professional news outlets for citizens who, otherwise, rely on TikTok and Tommy Robinson for information.
It is too late to still be tinkering around the edges. Fundamental change is needed to ensure truth is not a commodity. For what we saw in Belfast last Saturday was a new twist in the culture wars of this island. So twisted as to revive terrifying old nightmares.