The Irish question (again)

Last week’s violence in Northern Ireland, not really a “protest” but an organized pogrom, is being seized on by the British and international hard right as further evidence that “out-of-control immigration” is fuelling the justifiable anger of the beleaguered (and soon to be replaced) white majority. This is a steaming heap of horsefeathers.

It is true that almost all the families who were burned out of their houses in Belfast were non-white immigrants who were legally in the United Kingdom. It was also obviously a pogrom, not a spontaneous outbreak, because the paramilitary members leading the attacks had lists of addresses of the houses to be burned.

But if it was really fear about immigration and the “Great Replacement” that drove the violence, as Fox News, Elon Musk and all the gang claimed, then why did only Protestants (“Loyalists,” in the local parlance) join the pogrom? And why in Northern Ireland, which has the lowest rate of immigrants (three in 100) in the U.K.?

I have just spent a week or so going around Ireland, both north and south, and I can see plenty of reasons for hope. The Irish Republic (the south) has become a largely secular place, where the Catholic Church’s long stranglehold on the culture has evaporated. Simply put, it feels normal.

Northern Ireland is more complicated, because its demography is changing. It is right now making the transition from a territory with a narrow Protestant majority that sees membership in the United Kingdom as its guarantee of security to a domain with a narrow Catholic majority that has traditionally sought to unite with the Irish Republic.

Many people in the Republic are not eager to see that outcome, because they fear that it would import the bitter rivalries and divisions of the north to their own country. But if the north were to vote yes to unification in some future referendum, it would certainly be welcomed by most people in the south as the fulfilment of Ireland’s destiny.

The right to such a referendum is written into the Good Friday Agreement that ended the most recent round of “Troubles” in the North. (Three thousand killed between 1969 and 1998 in a minuscule but murderous civil war.)

The fact that the victims are immigrants rather than Catholics this time is misleading. They are just convenient targets for Protestant anxiety about change.

The rioters are genuine racists, but they follow a different drummer. They will be the next generation of Protestant paramilitaries, they have been itching for a fight, and here was an opportunity for some major aggro. So they took it.

It doesn’t mean it will take another war to unite Ireland. It’s not even certain that Ireland will ever be united. All I can say is that it doesn’t feel a bit like it did when the Troubles started in the summer of 1969. I was in Belfast when it kicked off.

I was a young Canadian naval officer on loan to the British Royal Navy, and the minesweeper I was in had to go into the Harland & Wolff shipyards in North Belfast for repairs. It took a week, while the Protestant community in the vicinity regaled us with talk about the impending disaster (in which some of them intended to assist).

My ship’s engineering officer was an Irishman from Dublin who just liked warships. (Irish citizens could serve in the Royal Navy Reserve.) He took me round the Catholic community, where I heard very similar stories from the other side. Lots of people on both sides were eager for it.

Then the stuff hit the fan, and when we sailed back out to sea we had to clear the upper decks to avoid snipers from the Short Strand (a Catholic enclave on the river). I was the navigator, so I had to stay up on the open bridge. It was my first time being shot at, but as Churchill said: “There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no effect.”

More to the point, I see little risk of another round of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.