It wasn’t, in fact, empty. Most of the straphangers had crowded to the ends of the car, leaving a gap of empty seats in the middle. It took me only a second to discern why. Sitting there was a man with a heavy shawl around his head and a stick in one hand. He rocked back and forth, absorbed in self-talk: now muttering softly, now breaking into shrill shouts. The language was maybe Tamazight, but I couldn’t be sure (I’m usually really good at clocking foreign tongues).

The doors closed behind me — too late to switch cars. According to an unwritten rule of subway safety, I should have joined the others at one of the two ends of the car. But I didn’t adhere to the crazy-guy-blast-radius norm, partly because I wanted to read my papers in peace, and partly because I figured the chances of an unpleasant incident were low.

 I figured wrong. As the train rattled through the underground, I’d glance up from my copy of the New York Post and catch the man glowering at me. He kept up his self-talk. His periodic outbursts, formerly directed at the cosmos or God or the gods, now seemed aimed at a specific target: me. First stop, Grand Central — no incident. Second stop, 33rd Street — still nothing, though the growling had intensified. Final stop, 28th Street — home free.

Or not. The man sprang up from his seat in tandem with my motion. Before I could reach the door, he removed the heavy shawl from around his neck and began whacking the backs of my legs. His shouting crescendoed to a mad sputtering rage. The shawl-whacking produced only mild discomfort, and maybe for that reason, my first thought wasn’t escape, but indignation mingled with amusement. For a split second, I just stood there in the door, looking into his deranged, unblinking eyes while the other passengers stepped around me and out. 

Then he raised his stick. OK, now get out.

Amusement and confusion — not really anger — were my initial emotions as I took the short walk from the station to our office. “Crazy old fuck,” I remember saying to myself with something like a smirk on my lips. Next came a set of questions. Why was this foreign person, who couldn’t speak English and was clearly out of his mind, menacing people on the transit system? Which precise path had brought him from his country to the Big Apple? Had he arrived as part of the Biden wave that had flooded the US homeland with an estimated 8 million newcomers, many of them unvetted? Or did he come earlier? And what was to become of him — raging stranger in a strange land — today, tomorrow, a month from now?

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Pope Leo’s unfashionable universalism

By Sohrab Ahmari

Soon the questions gave way to a conviction, which my mind repeated like a mantra: We shouldn’t have to live like this. We shouldn’t have to live like this. We shouldn’t. . . . I wasn’t unaware that my mantra is popular among the very-online Right on both sides of the Atlantic. This was discomfiting: the line had popped into my head in the same way that an advertising jingle might. It discomfited me still more that the mantra summed up precisely what I felt at that moment, and that it harbored a hard kernel of truth. 

I’d just then experienced an acute case of what I’ve come to call diversity stress or migration fatigue: the pervasive anxiety that attends life in societies buffeted by too much migration and too much diversity. Too much defined as the point at which assimilation falters and majority-minority distinctions evaporate. 

Diversity stress arises from having to constantly negotiate housing-, services-, and street-level incohesion: as we navigate linguistic barriers, normative differences, sheer unfamiliarity, and the potential for misunderstanding, the position is stressful, even if the outcome is relatively “harmless” (as in the case of my subway accoster). As the French geographer and urban theorist Christophe Guilluy has noted, people in such societies “need to manage, day in, day out, a thousand and one ethno-cultural questions while trying not to get caught up in hatred.”

It’s important to talk about diversity stress because it’s much less visible than spectacular cases of violence like the attempted beheading of Stephen Ogilvie by a Sudanese migrant in Belfast this week. Those sorts of cases are relatively — mind you, relatively — rare. They thus allow policymakers who’ve presided over uncontrolled migration to isolate the crisis in a dishonest manner: to speak of a few bad actors who must be left to the justice system to deal with.

What this framing misses is the systemic, low-grade diversity stress that afflicts much of the population as a result of mass migration, and which goes a long way toward explaining why seemingly “isolated” cases can trigger such ferocious eruptions of intercommunal violence. Put another way, if diversity stress weren’t constantly pressing down on society, then it would be reasonable to expect native populations to shrug off the “isolated” cases of ultra-violence. 

In reality, diversity stress isn’t isolated — it’s omnipresent. Its effects, once confined mostly to the working and lower-middle classes, now increasingly ensnare even the upper-middle sectors, those who enjoy the authentic-ethnic-cuisine pop-up restaurants and benefit from the cheap nannies, dry cleaners, gardeners, and the like. 

I fit into the latter category, though if anyone shouldn’t feel diversity stress, it’s me. As my byline hints, I’m foreign-born — an Iranian-American — and speak Persian fluently. My wife is likewise an immigrant, born and raised in China before coming to America as a teenager, lending our lives a nice sort of symmetry. 

Moreover, various mishaps caused my life to take a particularly circuitous path through the class structure: I was born to middle-class Iranian bohemians in the capital, Tehran, but lived in a rural trailer park upon first arriving in the United States. Then, within a decade, the American meritocracy catapulted me to Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers. As a reporter, I’ve broken bread with Romani people in the Hungarian countryside, and with presidents and prime ministers. I can instantly tell whether someone is from Iraq, Egypt, or Lebanon based on how they speak Arabic. I can tell Eritreans apart from Ethiopians just by examining their faces. In short, I embody neoliberal fluidity.

And yet — as my response to the interaction in the subway shows, I am feeling it. It’s the little things, easy to caricature and dismiss by pro-immigration advocates. But they add up.

At some point in the past few years, for example, seemingly Gotham’s entire taxi corps — once made up of African Americans and white-ethnics — was taken over by South Asians, who only made up about 40% of drivers in the late 1990s. Nowadays, when I land at LaGuardia or JFK airports, there’s a nine out of 10 chance that my driver will be South Asian: Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis. And they’re much more likely to have no idea what I’m talking about if I say, “Midtown East, take the Triborough.” Some will simply hand me their smartphones so I can input my destination, which is both alienating and requires me to actively monitor navigation; an exit might be closed for construction, and the driver has no capacity to improvise. Is that the end of the world? No. Nor is it stressful on a conscious level, but as an underlying irritant, it’s there.

Or take pedestrian transit in the city, an increasingly perilous enterprise as electric bikes and scooters have proliferated, and city authorities refuse to regulate these vehicles with even half as much vigor as they apply to cars. On a near-daily basis, at least one of these will zoom past me at a bewildering speed, the rider ignoring the pedestrian walk signal and forcing me to stop at the last minute lest my kids and I get struck. And almost always, the rider appears to be a diminutive Central American migrant racing to deliver a salad bowl to someone working from home like myself. Again, is that an indictment of Central Americans or an event to ruin my day? No, but still my fight-or-flight instinct has kicked in, and there’s a non-zero chance of my loved-ones and I ending up in the hospital. Even if we avoid physical harm, the experience creates diversity stress.

Finally, there’s the presence of burkas and niqabs among Muslim women on the streets and the underground, as well as their Asian medical equivalent, the protective face mask. Such face coverings are normative in parts of the Muslim world and East Asia, respectively, but they aren’t normative in the West. And while Western negative liberty guarantees a right to wear them, their very non-normativeness can be profoundly unsettling. To me, it suggests that I can’t be trusted not to leer at a woman’s face — or that I’m a mere vector for disease, rather than a fellow citizen and party to the social contract. And while I can’t speak for others, I must insist that I continue living in the West in order to live according to Western norms and standards.

This is just a snapshot. There are many other daily experiences of this kind. Any one of them, taken on its own, would be negligible. But taken cumulatively, they add up to a constant sense that everything is in flux, that I have no right to the familiar, or to any sense of stability in whom I’m obliged to accept as a neighbor. I’m also, as a member of the professional class, largely insulated from the worst of the diversity stress. I own a car in the city. I live in a co-op with a doorman, in the serene confidence that the two-bedroom unit above mine won’t suddenly come to be occupied by nine Turkish construction workers, who blast Turkish TV loudly into the night, chain-smoke inside, and don’t take too kindly to complaints.

Native-born working classes bear much more of the stress burden, giving rise to what Guilluy has described as the quintessential experience of mass-migration societies: the tense encounter in the stairway between a member of the old white proletariat and his Tunisian and Algerian neighbors in the suburbs that ring France’s 16 major cities. An American analog might be the experience of heritage African Americans in neighborhoods like Brooklyn’s Navy Yards or Roxbury in Boston, which became home to massive migrant-processing centers under the Biden administration. (All things considered, it’s a miracle that the anger stoked by such measures simmered but didn’t boil over.)

The working classes also disproportionately suffer from the economic stresses associated with unskilled mass migration, the way it undercuts the wages and bargaining power of those on the lower rungs of the labor market. The old labor Left didn’t fail to recognize the problem. As Paul Krugman, that arch-reactionary, observed in a 2006 New York Times column, “Many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration.” Because such newcomers “have much less education than the average US worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans.” Moreover, “low-skill immigrants threaten to unravel [our] safety net.” All this led the likes of United Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez and civil-rights pioneers Barbara Jordan and A. Philip Randolph to carve out restrictionist positions that scandalize their latter-day heirs.

But the economic stress, I suspect, is creeping up the class ladder. Take America’s competitive housing market. Ever since the 19th century, when the yeomanry tried — and failed — to keep their children living and toiling under the same roof, the American pattern has been for children to strike out independently after a certain age. Intergenerational solidarity, in other words, is thin. 

By contrast, many migrant families maintain thick networks of mutual support. Part of that involves within-lifetime transfers — i.e., the parents downscale their homes, gifting the price differential and other assets to their children while they’re still alive. Thus, between two lawyers starting at the same salary at the same mid-sized law firm (say), the one from a Korean or Chinese or Iranian migrant family will have a much easier time ascending to first-time homeownership (even if this means putting up the parents or in-laws, who then also double as babysitters, making it still easier for the adult kids to grind out billable hours).

But perhaps the deepest source of diversity stress — afflicting the native-born and migrant alike — is the growing illegibility of majority and minority as categories. From a simplistic moral perspective, this is to be celebrated: almost by definition, majorities tend to lord it over minorities; a society composed only of minorities, a highly diverse society, will prevent such oppression. But not so fast. In mass-migration societies, as Guilluy observed, “ ‘the other’ doesn’t become ‘somebody like yourself.’ And when ‘the other’ doesn’t become ‘somebody like yourself,’ you constantly need to ask yourself how many of the other there are — whether in your neighborhood or your apartment building.” No one, he added, “wants to be a minority,” yet that is exactly what uncontrolled mass migration does — to everyone — generating stress.

Societies in which minorities encounter a clear majority are ones that make possible a certain social bargain or exchange: We are this, and you are that, but you can become part of our thing by sharing our burdens, adopting our ways, and, yes, losing part of your old self. 

Without a clear majority — without a kind of social regency, which needn’t be racial — we end up with what one California historian called the “Blade Runner scenario,” after the Ridley Scott dystopian film based on Philip K. Dick’s novel: “the fusion of individual cultures into a demotic polyglotism ominous with unresolved hostilities” characterized by regular outbreaks of violence followed by “negotiated truce.” In the Blade Runner scenario, straining under diversity stress, I neither have a clear sense of what sets me apart as a minority, nor of my duties and prerogatives as a member of a majority. 

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Belfast after the ‘beheading’

By Aris Roussinos

But what about assimilation? Aren’t we ignoring the great American engine of assimilation, which can expand the majority, rather than living in fear of minorities overwhelming it? It’s true. America is better at assimilating newcomers than perhaps any other nation on Earth. But assimilation takes time, as Barbara Jordan, a Lyndon B. Johnson protégé who went on to chair President Clinton’s commission on immigration reform, noted. Like any engine, the assimilation engine breaks down when the volume of inputs becomes overwhelming.

There are signs that’s happening today. English-language acquisition among migrants, a key index of successful assimilation, is declining. “English proficiency is more common among immigrants who arrived in the US before 2000 than among those who entered the country later,” a Pew study found last year. “Some 57% of immigrants who came to the US before 2000 are proficient English speakers, compared with 47% who arrived in 2010 or later.” 

Things are in even more dismal shape when it comes to ideological Americanization. Already a decade ago, a Hudson Institute study found that immigrants are 20 percentage points less likely than the native-born to consider America a “better” country than others; 30 points more likely to consider themselves “citizens of the world”; 30 points more likely to believe that education should focus on “ethnic pride,” rather than American values; 15 points less likely to support teaching students about America’s founding documents; and so on.

Part of this has to do with decades of multicultural education. As the heterodox Leftist thinker Christopher Lasch noted, schools in the 19th and early 20th centuries emphasized “ ‘Americanism’ and … [the] promotion of universal norms.” This “had a liberating effect, helping individuals to make a fruitful break with parochial ethnic traditions.” Lasch cited as an example the late Norman Podhoretz. The neoconservative godfather was born to Jewish working-class immigrants. His educators saw it as their mission to pull boys (and, increasingly, girls) like him out of their respective parochialisms — into a higher sphere of cultivated judgment, engaged citizenship, and American norms. But by the time Lasch was writing, in the 1970s, multiculturalist education was already winning the day. Such education, Lasch warned, “deplores the disintegration of folk culture and pays no attention to the degree to which disintegration was often the price paid for intellectual emancipation.”

Fast forward half a century, and there is another challenge to assimilation: technology. For the generation of migrants to which Podhoretz’s parents belonged, coming to America meant casting away the Old World and its ways. This was easier to do than it is today, when migrants carry the Old World with them all day long — on their smartphones. Casting away the old is rather difficult for the migrant cabbie or truck driver who spends all day speaking to his relatives back home or watching soap operas in his native language. Or for the Chinese student who finishes her education almost entirely in the company of other Chinese, whether in person or on her WeChat app. Is there a policy fix to that? None that I can think of — other than what voters, especially downscale voters, across the developed world have been demanding for years now: reductions in overall numbers and much greater selectiveness on who’s admitted.

Diversity stress may be difficult to quantify. But it can be rigorously conceptualized as a form of negative externality or transaction cost that must be reckoned in any cost-benefit analysis about mass migration. For too long, policymakers across most of the developed world have ignored this hidden, pervasive cost. It is long past due that they balance the freedom of movement and the growth imperative against the right to the familiar. We shouldn’t have to live this way.

On Monday night, Hadi Alodid, a Sudanese refugee hitherto of no importance, managed to rivet Belfast’s global future onto the conflicts of its past when he hacked at the head of Stephen Ogilvie, while a neighbor recorded on her mobile phone. Alodid can scarcely have known that his attack was taking place at The Troubles’ epicenter: in North Belfast’s Byzantine sectarian geography, Kinnaird Avenue sits in a ribbon of firmly Irish Republican territory connecting the Sinn Féin heartlands of the New Lodge and Ardoyne. Barely 400 meters away, guarded by walls and fences disguised as urban parks, sits the “interface” with Ulster Loyalism’s Haram al-Sharif, the Shankill. Duncairn Avenue, where Alodid lived, just round the corner from the attack, runs into the junction of the Antrim Road and the New Lodge Road, the most dangerous spot of all in Northern Ireland’s lengthy civil conflict. In the Seventies, the notorious Shankill Butchers gangs cruised these streets in the middle of the night, looking for Catholics walking home from parties, drunk, so they could kidnap them and take them back to the Shankill to torture them before murdering them.

When the Belfast Telegraph’s Suzanne Breen wrote an article reminding readers of that history, where violent knife attacks were entirely home grown, she was savaged by overseas online Right-wingers for arrant cuckery. But one cannot understand the pattern of this week’s events in Belfast — where, after a brutal assault by a Muslim immigrant in one of the city’s Republican strongholds, Republican neighborhoods remained quiet while Loyalist districts saw violent protests and a seemingly well-orchestrated campaign in which immigrant families were burned out — without understanding the city’s recent past, and how it has led the leaderships of each major community to interpret the growth of the city’s ethnic minority population differently.

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Belfast after the ‘beheading’

By Aris Roussinos

To what extent the leaders of Northern Ireland’s Nationalists can continue to take an almost entirely unfinessed pro-immigration line, and how the region’s small but rapidly growing ethnic minority communities will engage with its Nationalist and Unionist traditions, are two of the biggest imponderables in the region’s politics. Northern Ireland’s ethnic minority populations may be small, but as the demographic balance of the region’s indigenous groups sits on a knife-edge, and The Troubles refuse to recede entirely into the past, their views and contributions may be decisive to the region’s future. Indeed, the story of Kinnaird Avenue, the street where the attack took place, is itself revealing of Belfast’s inability to put The Troubles behind it. The street was only built in the 2010s, long after The Troubles ended in fits and starts in the mid-to-late Nineties, yet it is perceived as Republican territory.

It sits on part of the Girdwood army barracks site, a 20-minute stroll from the voguish downtown warehouse conversions of the Cathedral Quarter. When it was decommissioned in 2005, there was hope that it would provide desegregated housing and shared leisure facilities, acting as a bridge between the Loyalist Greater Shankill and Republican New Lodge areas — the beginning of the end of the Balkanization of North Belfast.

This hope was in vain. In the end, only 60 houses, less than a third of the planned number, were completed in this area of significant need. Scuppering the hope were two demographic issues that remain acute in post-Troubles North Belfast: Unionist decline and the paranoia this engenders, and the desperate housing shortage and overcrowding among Nationalists. Sectarian boundaries were fixed in the early Seventies, and while people from both communities were intimidated from areas where they were in the local minority, Catholics were the bigger losers. Gradually, mixed areas, often the better-off ones, tended to become predominantly Nationalist as Catholics who moved up the social scale in the wake of anti-discrimination laws sought out available local housing.

A second extensive round of mutual intimidation took place in the late Nineties, as Northern Ireland was supposedly welcoming the new peace. I remember vividly canvassing in North Belfast for the Alliance Party in the 1998 Assembly elections which immediately followed the Good Friday Agreement. On perhaps a dozen occasions I went to a house with names on the electoral register to find it had been abandoned in a hurry just weeks or even days previously, with children’s textbooks and toys lying scattered in the hall. Some were Nationalists who had long been living peacefully in Loyalist areas; some were Unionists who had long been living peacefully in Republican areas. Other people decided their presence was no longer welcome and the lives these mostly deeply apolitical people had built for themselves were destroyed. This didn’t happen in middle-class areas, only among the poor. By the 2010s, the North Belfast parliamentary seat was held by the Democratic Unionist Party, but only by a thin majority over Sinn Féin. The DUP reckoned that, given the imbalance in local social housing waiting lists, the lion’s share of the houses would go to Nationalists, so stalled on the development. Sinn Féin took the seat in 2019 anyway.

As far as Belfast natives went, the houses that were actually built on the New Lodge side of the site, including Kinnaird Avenue, were occupied by Nationalists, those on the Greater Shankill side by Unionists. Last May, when some Nationalist families moved into newly built houses on the Shankill side of the peace wall, having been duly allocated to them by Northern Ireland’s public housing authority, Loyalists attacked their homes with masonry and almost all fled. In the new Northern Ireland, though, some things have changed: the DUP condemned the attacks as resolutely as their Sinn Féin counterparts in their often-uncomfortable all-party power-sharing government. But Nationalists are still intermittently intimidated out of Loyalist areas, not just in North Belfast but across Northern Ireland — something almost entirely ignored outside the region.

So, it isn’t entirely surprising when Loyalists call for protests against migrants or immigration, that Nationalists, even if they are concerned about the rapid rise in immigration, or even if they are frank racists, are loath to join in. This is even more the case when the protests bear clear hallmarks of being organized by Loyalist paramilitaries. Northern Ireland’s police claim still to be assessing whether they were directly involved in this week’s events, but something of the fear they still engender can be seen in the way the notices calling for the protests, which commanded “all businesses to close” at a given time each day – “no excuses” — were almost universally obeyed, even by schools and museums.

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While some members of armed Loyalist groups duly laid down their arms and returned to normal life as part of the decommissioning process of the mid-2000s, others morphed into a sort of Ulster mafia, heavily involved in organized crime, and aware that as long as they refrain from targeting members of the Nationalist community in overtly political or sectarian attacks, they are likely to be treated with kid gloves by the authorities. Sudden, short-lived, outbreaks of rioting, enough to annoy but not enough to make residents of working-class Loyalist areas turn vociferously against them, have long been a means for them to flex their muscles. This is the third summer in a row when Northern Ireland has witnessed a sudden outbreak of intense racist intimidation, which disappears almost as soon as it arrives, and while Loyalist paramilitaries don’t seem to have started any of these outbreaks, they seem to have developed strategies for capitalizing on them rapidly.

Northern Ireland Nationalists are also acutely aware that the Right-wing British figures expressing concern after a barbaric attack by a Muslim asylum seeker in one of their neighborhoods are usually hostile to them, and rarely express any concern on the many occasions when the people attacking them are white Britons.

It is into this site of chronic long-term sectarian territorial conflict, with an unbroken habit of intimidating local minorities from their homes, that the level of immigration has increased, very obviously and very rapidly, since the mid-2010s, but especially since the pandemic. Similar things are seen all over Western Europe. But this isn’t all over Western Europe — Belfast is Ground Zero for the Troubles, its worst outbreak of violence in the past 80 years, a recent past that continues to define the present.

It isn’t historically unusual for civilizational ideological conflicts to be subsumed into long-standing local disputes in deeply divided societies — see what happened under Nazi occupation in Belgium, Yugoslavia, or the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands. The idea that Nationalists are on the Left and Unionists on the Right is already pretty deeply rooted in Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin, so far, seems to be both ideologically committed to a pro-immigration stance and believes it will reap long-term rewards in a region where the balance of power between the two traditional ethno-sectarian blocs, neither of which is in a majority, is increasingly influenced by ethnic minorities and detribalized bourgeois liberals.

Yet survey data shows that Catholics are only marginally more supportive of immigration than Protestants in Northern Ireland. The potential for a backlash, then, within Northern Ireland Nationalism to the pro-migration approach of its leaders is very real. Similarly, if more incidents like this occur in Republican areas, I wouldn’t assume that attitudes to migrants there couldn’t sour rapidly, as they have among the working class in the Republic, and then some sort of anti-immigration force emerge to challenge the status quo in Nationalist politics. This could come in either or both of two forms: an electoral challenge or a challenge on the streets. As far as the latter goes, Aontú, a conservative splinter from Sinn Féin that is only moderately restrictionist on immigration, has never caught wind, especially in the North. But new political parties emerging from nowhere is a hallmark of the 2020s, and Northern Ireland has a big election year in 2027, a rare year when seats on local councils and the region’s Assembly are up for grabs at the same time. The evidence that a few Nationalists were indeed joining in with Loyalist-led protests, and others regarded them with less hostility than in the past, is a sign that some sort of street-based anti-immigrant movement might have legs; although, if it emerged, it would face considerable and perhaps physical opposition from the cluster of groups that are both leftwards of and more militant than Sinn Féin, already extant in Belfast’s Republican strongholds.

My hometown’s palimpsest has long contained story after story of people being put out of their homes because of their religion. Increasingly it is collecting stories of people being put out of their homes because of the color of their skin. Being burned out of your home just because of who you are is, sadly, as Belfast as it gets. As racial diversity increases and insecurity grows, this city of the frozen conflict is perhaps the continent’s least predictable and most combustible powder keg.

The statement was laced with officialese: and Ogilvie is reportedly from Rathcoole, a predominantly Loyalist housing estate north of Belfast. Was the suspiciously polished family statement, many wondered, issued by the Government on the family’s behalf? And if so, why? Social media, unsurprisingly, decided “the State” dictated the Ogilvies’ response. Victims of controversial killings involving ethnic minorities, it was alleged, are manipulated by government spinners. And so the scene was set, digital barricades erected, culture warriors firing barbs across no-man’s-land. It’s hardly the favored territory of  officialdom, with police comms teams too often flailing in the septic tank of 24/7 social media. 

What, though, is the truth? Are families pressurized to give statements sympathetic to official narratives? How seriously does the Government take threats concerning racial tension? And, as Britain enters another potential summer of unrest, are police forces prepared?

First, the specifics of the family statement. Given the severity of Ogilvie’s injuries, a police family liaison officer — or FLO — would be assigned to support them throughout the investigation. Police FLOs are widely considered to be a success story, offering support to victims during distressing circumstances. Nonetheless, they are also detectives with a hotline to the Senior Investigating Officer. Furthermore, victims’ families do receive advice on issuing statements. Statements might be discussed over cups of tea, FLOs explaining how they might impact future criminal proceedings. All parties are likely to have been briefed by force comms officers, keen to dampen down contentious issues. Note how, for example, Henry Nowak’s father gave a full statement — one criticizing police actions around his son’s death — only after Vickrum Digwa’s trial. 

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It seems likely, then, that the Ogilvies’ statement would have been “managed” via the FLO and the wider PSNI. This is standard practice. Suggestions the security services might involve themselves in such matters, in my experience, are wide of the mark. Given the uniquely fraught circumstances Northern Irish officers operate under, not to mention the forthcoming marching season, any public statement would attract the interest of a three-ring circus of community and political groups. Added to this is the Sinn Féin majority administration’s pro-immigration policies, making the party vulnerable to allegations of being “soft” on issues of race. This is why John Boutcher, the (English) PSNI chief constable, tiptoes daily across a minefield of political sensitivities. This isn’t to say there wasn’t some authenticity to the Ogilvies’ statement, nor that the family’s contribution wasn’t heartfelt, but their words seem almost certain to have been polished.

Is the Ogilvie case, then, an example of comms management particular to post-Troubles Belfast? Or does the British government routinely control public sentiment in cases involving potential disorder? My experience working in counterterrorism suggests it does, albeit subtly, even if things have invariably evolved. Techniques pioneered to prevent post-terror attack riots are deployed against vaccine-skeptics and those on the “radical Right.” The Government clearly is spooked: only this week, Liz Kendall, Secretary of State for Science, declared the Government would urgently seek to update the Online Safety Act so that it requires services “to take quicker action to remove illegal content circulating during times of crisis.”

Even during my police service, I witnessed how genuinely petrified senior police officers and civil servants are of wide-scale public disorder. The 2001 Oldham riots, involving three nights of racially motivated violence, focused their minds. The context, by 9/11 that September, was that of Muslim communities targeted by the far-Right after any terrorist incident. During the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in 2005, working in counterterrorism intelligence, I saw police commanders repeatedly ask the same question: how do we stop Muslim communities from going up in flames? How do we stop another Oldham? Liberal-minded officers, such as Brian Paddick, were accused of cravenness. Others sounded like colonial governors, fretting over restless natives. That was then. Now, we have pro-Gaza independent MPs exercising de facto control over police operations.

Central government is painfully aware of these problems. The United Kingdom, were it a car, would be a Cold War-era Trabant, its engine spluttering as an era draws inexorably to a close. This isn’t to say the powers-that-be haven’t mounted a spirited defense, updating the creaking two-stroke engine with a digital-management system. Post 7/7, the Government established the Research, Information and Communications unit, known as RICU. A relatively small unit, independent of the security services, RICU works with local authorities and media contractors to create and disseminate content. To counter Islamist narratives, RICU’s communications aim to “effect behavioral and attitudinal change.” These techniques are also employed elsewhere, as was evident during the Covid pandemic and in the aftermath of last summer’s anti-immigration protests. Now, though, public information and sentiment strategies intended to combat Islamist terrorism have been targeted at those threatening official narratives around “diversity” and “community cohesion”. During the same protests, the “National Security and Online Information Team”, a body within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, asked online platforms to moderate content critical of government narratives. 

Then, after the post-Southport riots, came the Home Office’s awful “rapid analytical sprint” report. Only 18 months old, the “sprint” has aged like milk. It posited a new offense of communications that inflict “psychological harm”, demonstrating Labour’s ongoing obsession with controlling language. It urged the police to increase their use of since-abandoned Non-Crime Hate Incidents. Perhaps most telling of all, though, is RICU’s use of “controlled spontaneity” after terrorist incidents — the kind of tactics the Home Office are likely to use in order to counter anti-immigration sentiment. In that vein, a veteran contingency planner told Middle East Eye that “this job has changed significantly from planning for organic, people responses to tragedy, to being told: ‘We would like the people to do that, how do you get them there? A lot of the public’s responses are spontaneous, of course. But a lot are shaped. The [British] government doesn’t want spontaneity: it wants controlled spontaneity.” Controlled spontaneity involves bussing in peace-preaching imams. Putting up posters in railway stations. Facilitating vigils. The panoply of “Don’t look back in anger” theatre, inspired by the public’s (genuine) response to the 2017 Manchester bombing.

Admittedly, controlled spontaneity sounds a tall order in a city like Belfast, yet the mindset remains similar. Seize the initiative. Frame narratives. Control. But official narratives have become suspect, especially in racially sensitive cases. For the Government, the potential for widespread disorder explains the urgency of its internet-control agenda. Why? The alternative is unthinkable. Due to austerity, UK police forces are short of personnel, training, and equipment, with the consequence that their ability to keep order has been seriously diminished. For example, after the Stephen Ogilvie stabbing, the PSNI was forced to fly in 200 extra officers from the mainland to support its operations. At the recent pro-Palestine and Right-wing “Unite the Kingdom” demonstrations in London, the Metropolitan Police fielded 4,000 officers, but only with reinforcements from as far afield as Wales. Luckily for the Met, the demonstrations were largely peaceful. 

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The police can’t control Britain’s streets

By Dominic Adler

This, ultimately, is why the Government devotes so much of its political bandwidth to messaging, communications and sentiment management: its capability to police public disorder has atrophied. An officer with a Home Counties force recently told me how senior officers are currently “wargaming” their response to any repeat of Southport-style unrest this summer. “We aren’t the Met, we don’t have dedicated public order officers,” he said. “We’ll be relying on PCs taken from other duties, guys with only basic shield training.” And the mood music in police HQ command floors? “Grim. They’ve run out of money. They simply don’t have enough people available.” His message was clear: if England “kicks off”, it’s every force for itself. As they head off on holiday this summer, this will prey on the minds of chief officers and Home Office mandarins. All this after the performance of Hampshire police during bushfire demonstrations in Southampton was mixed. 

The UK’s police “mutual aid” arrangements, as seen at the London demonstrations earlier this year, assume supporting one or two major incidents. Multiple outbreaks of serious public disorder would almost certainly collapse the system. “Basically,” said the officer, less prosaically, “we’d be fucked.” And what, I asked, of the last resort? Calling in the army? He laughed. “They haven’t got enough people either, have they?”

This, in the end, clarifies the relative importance of subtler measures. British governments pride themselves on their ability to negotiate. To parley their way out of problems, while assuming the UK remains a high-trust society. A society with a functioning social contract, the glue keeping the Trabant of state legitimacy on the road. This is why, when cuts are required, legislators axe the state’s more coercive arms — the military and policing. 

Yet now that public trust has eroded, along with the social contract, legitimacy is surely next. The Government, though, will continue with its displacement activity, fretting over internet misinformation and polishing statements made by grieving families. A frontline consisting of internet monitors and family liaison officers, armies of “performative spontaneity” coordinators urging us not to “look back in anger”.

The Trabant that is the UK state trundles along, held together with little more than duct-tape and good intentions. Such apathy typifies the mindsets of senior police and civil servants, until the predictable happens. With luck, next time, disorder will again be contained. Reviews will be commissioned and public inquiries launched. Lessons will, allegedly, be learned. And, somewhere, another violent man will cross a border unchallenged. Then another statement will be burnished, until the Trabant’s engine finally sputters and dies for good. 

A good portion of their narrow terraced street, which had, until that evening, housed non-European migrants, had been burned out. The migrants had been escorted away in armored Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Landrovers earlier; the houses, and cars outside, were now blackened shells. Taking a photo of the devastation, eerily lit by the blue lights of the emergency services, I tried to persuade a local woman, on promise of anonymity, to grant me an interview. Two burly men, overhearing me, ushered me into a dark corner where they demanded to search my phone’s camera roll, to ensure I had not captured any local faces. Once they were satisfied, the larger of the two men warned me, “with no animosity, like, don’t be asking any more questions. We don’t want any journalists down here.” I understand, I said, but it’s my job. “In this country?” replied his more excitable colleague, “Are you fucking daft? Fuck away off and get on home before you get kneecapped.”

There was, perhaps, no arguing the point. Hostility to journalists was ubiquitous, at least on the Loyalist side. Over the course of the day, in which protests had been announced on social media in a bewildering variety of locations across Northern Ireland, a constant theme had been that no cameras, and no phones, were to be allowed. Protesters had been advised to dress in all-dark clothes, and to mask up: rather than hosting the carnival of livestreamers accompanying many such anti-migrant events in England and the Irish Republic, tonight was to be serious business. What violence there was, rather than aimlessly directed at the police, was to be coldly and carefully targeted against individual migrant homes. Coming home to Belfast from London that afternoon, I had returned to a place of ghostly quietness, where confused tourists wandered past the shuttered shops and bars of the deserted city center. The horrifying attempted beheading of a North Belfast man by a Sudanese migrant, captured on video, would have been incendiary enough in a mainland Britain increasingly host to such horrors; in hitherto untouched Belfast, the assumption was that tonight’s response would be a historic event.

What gave the atrocity its added political piquancy was that it took place in a firmly Catholic, Nationalist area. The symbolism of the attacker being beaten off with a hurling stick, a symbol of Irish cultural nationalism — by a local man named Maitiu Mág Tighearnán — was quickly taken up by new Irish Republican factions firmly set against mass migration. Until now, the governing rule of thumb was that anti-migrant riots are, in Northern Ireland, a purely Loyalist affair, which Catholic Nationalists regard with detached dismissal. But it is increasingly common to hear grumblings against mass migration from working-class Catholics, grumblings entirely absent from their community’s social media and journalistic commentators. Indeed, the locally influential Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), which claims not to be the political wing of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), has recently begun to make its veiled criticisms of mass migration explicit, seeking to capture the turning mood and turn it against their politically dominant rivals Sinn Féin. In its statement delivered on the night of the attack, the IRSP declared its support for a residents’ group protesting the siting of a migrant hostel in West Belfast’s Republican Glen Road, and warned against the silencing of “legitimate working class concerns about immigration” within “communities, who, with zero consultation, have never seen such demographic shifts in their lifetime”.

Northern Irish Republicanism has, until now, been insulated by the country’s post-peace process political system — guaranteeing an increasingly socially liberal Sinn Féin a role in government — from the anti-migration disturbances that have roiled the Irish Republic in recent years. The long-expected moment when that would change appears to be slowly dawning, accelerated by the violent horror of this attack, deep within the Republican inner sanctum. “You wouldn’t expect this happening here, not since the days of the Troubles,” one Catholic woman, smoking a cigarette on the doorstep of her neatly-presented terraced house, told me of the attack sparking the night’s events. “As a mother of young boys you worry what might happen to them, it’s shocking, just shocking is what it is.”

Yet in North Belfast, a patchwork of jealously guarded sectarian enclaves and exclaves, which makes a map of the Holy Roman Empire look manageable, the traditional ethnic conflict is of far greater relevance than whatever new politics is being formed by the decisions of Whitehall officials, who have rapidly turned Belfast into one of the United Kingdom’s prime destinations for asylum resettlement. On North Queen Street, one of North Belfast’s many euphemistically termed “interface areas”, where the two communities abut each other, Catholic Nationalists cheerily watched masked Protestant youths, masked and dressed in black, set barriers alight and fill petrol bombs, the two sides observing each other from a healthy distance. On the Catholic side, commanding-looking men in expensive black SUVs sat overseeing the events, occasionally nodding at messages whispered to them through their car windows.

On the Protestant side, where older women held up placards saying “Women and Children Not Safe In This Area” behind a screen of intimidating masked teenagers, a woman laughed at a police patrol car making a rapid about-turn from the area. “Look at them doughnuts he’s doing,” she said to her friend, “He’s from Divis [a notorious West Belfast Catholic housing estate] flying about like that.” One older man, who appeared to be drunk, angrily tried to pull the bemused driver of a rental lorry, with Southern plates, from his cab, following his awkward and failed attempt to negotiate the unexpected and blazing barricade. No doubt in the new spirit of cross-community co-operation, other Protestants intervened, leading their errant colleague away and giving the driver alternative directions to his destination with a kind of exaggerated politeness rare to Belfast. Unlike previous anti-immigration riots, where the PSNI came under furious and sustained assault, this time round the police were markedly absent, occasionally sending officers in patrol cars to pull burning bins away from traffic intersections, and instead leaving the two hostile communities they are normally at such costly pains to separate to explore each others’ unmediated proximity.

“It’s an excuse for them [Loyalists] to come out, build their numbers and then they’ll attack our community, it happens all the time,” one Catholic man from the fiercely Republican New Lodge told me, while grinding weed for a joint. “We’re all just standing here so, you can see, and they’re all covered up, covered up to their teeth, all black as your boot. Don’t you be going down that side,” he warned me, “they’re a lot more aggressive down there, even though their side supports Britain, you know.” Even still, he added, tonight was something new. “It’s about both sides, you know, the Green and the Orange coming together.” An older Catholic man from the New Lodge, watching the Protestant rioters with his Southern-accented female companion, agreed. “They [migrants] shouldn’t be allowed in this country,” he told me. “We’re keeping our distance there at the minute,” he added, nodding at the rioting Protestants, “but by right we should all be coming together here. They shouldn’t be in this country.” His grey-haired male friend, shaking his head angrily, walked away saying “I don’t agree with you there, mate.” I asked the first man what he thought of his Sinn Féin elected representatives. “Arseholes,” he replied.

Walking down, past burning barricades on the Clifton Circus roundabout overseen by a thin garrison of teenage sentries, I went to a different burning barricade on the staunchly Loyalist Shankill Road, where I met Amanda, a 60-year old woman shouting “Leftie scum!” at an ITV news crew. Though telling me that I “looked like a Leftie”, she agreed to talk to me. “We’re feeling very, very angry, we’re just tired,” she told me. “It just goes from one thing to the next thing, and they’re just all horrible situations. We’ve just come out of the horrible situation of Henry Nowak, and now, this week, we’ll have the young man almost decapitated up on the Antrim Road.” Smoke rose from a new development of executive apartments under construction over the road, which were locally controversial. Indians were buying up all the new flats on the Shankill, which locals can’t afford, she told me, and turning them into Airbnbs. “We don’t want them here,” she added, telling me of her appreciation for Rupert Lowe — an extremely rare cut-through of English politics in Northern Ireland’s insular political universe — and distrust of the insufficiently staunch Nigel Farage. As for the Catholics, she told me, “You know, we fought each other, ever since I was so high,” indicating a point a little off the sidewalk with her hand, “but we’ve had to come together because there’s a new threat from outside the country. When you start bringing in another threat from outside, well, the people are obviously going to have to unite, because we’re being invaded by illegal migrants and immigrants on this side of the community, and they’re being equally affected with the same situation. So, what else are we going to do?”

The idea of Catholics and Protestants uniting against mass immigration is, overwhelmingly, one pushed more by Loyalists than by Nationalists, with the former observing both the rabid hostility displayed by Loyalist activists to expressions of cultural identity like the Irish language, and the frequent violent intimidation of Catholics living in working-class Protestant areas as far more of an immediate and existential threat. Indeed, even Nationalists hostile to mass immigration view any coordination with Loyalists as a strategic catastrophe, gifting ammunition to their pro-immigration enemies within Irish Republicanism. But in the aftermath of the North Belfast atrocity, there has for the very first time begun, though certainly not an alliance, then the first glimmerings of a tentative and distrustful rapprochement. The nightmare scenario for Sinn Féin would have been Catholics rioting against immigrants. That did not happen: instead, working-class Catholics merely turned out to watch their Protestant neighbors riot with an anthropological detachment newly devoid of open contempt. I have never until now heard working-class Catholics, from devoutly Republican areas, talking about the coming together of the “Orange and the Green” with anything other than derision. At Ardoyne Roundabout, one of North Belfast’s most volatile sectarian interface areas, protestors from both communities shook hands and declared amity in scenes that were genuinely startling.

But this is, ultimately, Northern Ireland, where the age-old ethnic conflict is as perennial and inescapable as the soaking rain that drew the night’s events to a close. It is, probably, doubtful that anything will come of the cautious street flirtation, and as July’s marching and bonfire season draws close, we can no doubt expect a reversion to the old ways rather than the ungainly new dalliances of 2026. But, nonetheless, there was something novel and unexpected about the occasion: the working-class communities of both sides, accustomed to hating each other, and increasingly estranged from their political leaders in Stormont, for the first time eyeing each other up, from a distance, like awkward teenagers at a disco. Northern Ireland is an extremely dysfunctional country, though very charming and livable for it: it is entirely unique for both communities to find common cause in blaming Westminster for introducing an unexpected source of random, violent dysfunction to unsettle their old and comforting, formalized one.

In its report on the 2024 summer riots, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary quizzed senior officers on their intelligence strategy. As shops were looted and cops dodged bricks, they confessed to “writing the manual as it happened”. This is new. Historically speaking, British police were masters at investigating domestic extremism, something they achieved by asking three fairly straightforward questions. What is the issue motivating a protest group? How likely is there to be wider support for that issue? Who are the agitators seeking to weaponize the issue?

It’s an approach that worked well in the past. Public order and counter-extremism intelligence helped police environmental and animal rights extremism in the Nineties and early 2000s. It pinpointed potential IRA sympathizers inside radical Leftist organizations. Later, investigators established links between criminal groups and extremism, encompassing everything from football hooligans and the far-Right to urban street gangs and Islamists.

I witnessed these successes myself. Monitoring Belfast flights from Heathrow in the mid-Nineties, I remember stopping a nervous-looking man from Andersonstown in west Belfast. I telephoned the RUC. “Ah, that fella? He did six years in the Maze for firearms,” said the Special Branch officer down the line, who knew which pubs he drank in, the school he attended and the registration number of his car. “He’s also got size 11 feet,” he added.

To give a sense of how much things have changed, consider the example of “Stand Up to Racism” (SUTR), the most prolific pro-migrant organization in Epping and elsewhere. However harmless its middle-class activists may seem, the group is closely linked to the Socialist Workers Party, itself a sect of avowed revolutionary Trotskyists. That, in theory, should mean the activist’s motives should be suspect — Trotskyists, after all, are committed to undermining oppressive state organs, using any cause du jour as their weapon.

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The invasion of the phone snatchers

By Dominic Adler

These days, unfortunately, representatives of activist groups are virtual police consultants. For example, His Majesty’s Inspectorate included analysis by the controversial group Hope Not Hate in its post-Southport report. More cynical officers see such relationships as anti-officer Trojan Horses, welcomed through the gates by spineless senior officers. The firebrand activist Lee Jasper, for instance, was once famously made a policing adviser by Ken Livingstone. I remember officers joking how inviting him inside Scotland Yard was akin to putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank.

That institutional closeness, in turn, eventually created a ghost in the machine, one which has calcified into allegations of two-tier policing. Certainly, Reform activists are unlikely to be invited into any independent advisory groups. In my experience, ambitious senior officers are more likely to listen to the advice of media-savvy and politically connected advisers than their own officers.

Ideology, then, is clearly an important factor here — yet it’s far from the only issue. After all, the initial retreat from domestic intelligence-gathering was driven by circumstance. From 9/11, officers focused almost exclusively on jihadism. Then, when budgets were squeezed post-2008, police began culling their public order intelligence units, preferring to monitor social media instead.

Yet as the kids-glove approach to groups like the SUTR implies, it’s hard here not to return to the question of ideology. “Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together,” proclaimed Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick, when I was a Special Branch officer at the time of the 7/7 bombings. Yes, we raised our eyebrows too. Nonetheless, Paddick’s words were consistent with the establishment narrative around the sanctity of British multiculturalism. A decade or so later, London’s mayor famously suggested terrorism was “part and parcel” of living in a global city. This gaslighting spawned a counter-narrative: one of two-tier policing.

This, it goes without saying, augurs badly for British police forces, which now answer to a political class openly sympathetic to the sentiments underpinning radical activism. It hardly helps, of course, that shorn of its long heritage of investigating domestic extremism, officers are increasingly taking a more broad-brushed approach, with forces seduced by the technological panopticon of social media aggregation and sentiment monitoring. Rather than expensively and intrusively snooping on the hardcore minority seeking to ferment unrest, they’ve decided it’s somehow fairer to monitor everyone.

And so the securocracy creates new definitions of extremism, such as “cultural nationalism“, or incels, or the other phantoms haunting Whitehall’s imagination. This, of course, ignores the more compelling issues, the ones politicians find intractable. Ethnic tension. Direct action. Sabotage. An era of harassment and violence, segueing into terrorism, all occurring during a time of technological plenty, one where would-be urban guerillas have cheap access to drones, encrypted communications and AI.

What’s clear, then, is that police chiefs must urgently reconfigure their national intelligence-gathering capabilities, as the Met’s Sir Mark Rowley himself lately acknowledged. Nor do we even need to grasp back into the depths of time here. Before the Metropolitan Police disbanded its Special Branch, in 2006, there were detectives who specialized in monitoring extremists within London’s diaspora communities. They excelled at the painstaking work of cultivating and maintaining discreet relationships with religious and political leaders. Situations were diffused. Disorder was averted. Ringleaders were identified. And cards, to put it bluntly, were marked.

Now, Britain’s non-existent borders means new arrivals import a smorgasbord of causes, disputes and feuds. That’s even as police intelligence-gathering activity — especially surveillance and recruiting informants — often invites allegations of bullying and racism. I remember when Left-wing groups, sometimes endorsed by radical MPs, supported militants like the IRA and the Kurdish PKK, and were bitterly opposed to police monitoring their activities. A more recent example would be the furore created when UK BLM supporters were approached to offer confidential information on protest activity after George Floyd’s murder.

Senior officers, understanding the nature of the beast, carried on regardless. The uncomfortable truth is that beating domestic extremism means monitoring radical activism — but not necessarily criminal activity. Such grey zones are the terrain in which extremists hide. In the late Nineties, far-Right nail bomber David Copeland passed through the radical, but not illegal, British National Party. The comparison is far from perfect, of course, but a more contemporary example might be activists vicariously linked to the newly proscribed Palestine Action. This would identify thousands of people sympathetic to “the cause” involved in entirely lawful organizations, and it would be wrong (not to mention impossible) to track them all.

Understanding the law is important here too. In the dry language of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, police must be mindful of intelligence-gathering for reasons of “collateral intrusion”. This is partly why senior officers became overreliant on open-source social media monitoring: surveilling the public online is less politically risky and resource-intensive than focusing on the hardcore. That surely explains why police are wrong-footed when activists on e-scooters cause havoc inside critical military facilities. As social unrest increases, anyway, lawmakers should accept unlawful political action has always rubbed shoulders, albeit uneasily, with lawful activism, from the Suffragettes to Irish Republicanism.

And though such intensive surveillance is obviously expensive, it’s arguably still cheaper than the alternative. After all, public order policing is eye-wateringly expensive. Between October 2023 and February 2025, policing pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London has cost the Met over £53 million. How much would a rolling campaign of public disorder cost? Imagine disturbances occurring — everywhere, constantly. Apart from being tragic on its own terms, this normalization of political violence would quickly bankrupt the state.

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The Ulsterisation of English politics

By Aris Roussinos

For the police, one answer to this dilemma is reassuringly simple: local policing, the alleged core principle of British law enforcement. Beat cops are an essential part of the police’s early warning system, especially now forces find themselves with a newly radicalized, racially aware faction to consider: disaffected and underprivileged white communities. That’s especially true when they lack the religious links and clan networks found elsewhere in Britain; in places like Epping, protests are generally spontaneous and “leaderless”. Yet as they say in Belfast, nobody hears “the dogs on the street” bark as quickly as a switched-on copper.

What’s clear now is that a new approach is urgently required, one where gauging potential disorder is routine. Again, Northern Ireland hoves into view. During the Troubles, the Royal Ulster Constabulary embedded local special branch teams into police stations, purely to identify subjects of interest. Was the tactic controversial and bitterly contested? Yes. Was it effective? Absolutely.

Not that this is just a question of institutional change. If they were cannier, senior police officers might recognize how the system is rigged against them. They might also be less inclined to tip-toe around the elite’s luxury beliefs. After all, they remain constables, swearing an oath to keep the peace without “fear or favor”. And, if the current crop of chief officers, Linkedin technocrats with warrant cards, aren’t up to the challenge? Sack them. Keep indulging failure, though, and the uniforms on our streets might eventually be less hi-viz yellow and more camouflage and khaki.

Admittedly, tensions had been rising for over a month as politicians and fascists politicised a murder at a wedding to sow hatred and division. But nobody expected it to come to this. How could a European city so rich in culture and on the road to development be torn apart by such brutal violence? Overnight, Sarajevo had become a byword for the dangers of ethnic division, ultra-nationalistic fervour, tribalism and wanton extremism.

The events of the past few days in the United Kingdom reveal a number of familiar traces. Southport has become synonymous with Sarajevo, in the sense that, once again, under the watchful sun a small extremist minority is seeking to politicise a brutal tragedy and turn it into something whose consequences reach across the country. This is not protest; it’s about violence, terror and a naked appeal to intimidation.

The idea of a civil war has traditionally referred to an internal conflict where one armed group seeks to wrestle power from the state. While some may brush this aside by suggesting a civil war is not something that the British do, we should not be so complacent. Remember, after all, that alongside the American version, the English civil war between 1642-51 remains one of the most instructive. As a result of this very British version of civic slaughter, the modern theory of sovereignty appeared in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Not only did it put forward the now-familiar mantra that there is no politics without security and no security without the state, it also set in place the fundamental understanding — later picked up by Max Weber — that only the state can engage in legitimate violence.

What marks a civil war from this perspective is a contesting of that very monopoly and the state’s right to use force for the preservation of order. That the police forces who appear on the front lines often become the first targets is not then incidental. But where is the line that needs to be crossed so that civil tensions become a war? Since the Seventies, critical thinkers such as Michel Foucault sought to invert the logic of civil war to explain how states are always waging a kind of silent battle upon minority groups. Through this, notions such as structural violence emerged. Presenting a civil war as a process — one that is not always about widespread slaughter but can also be measured in terms of a broader account of violence and social tensions — does have some merit. The danger with such reasoning, however, is that if everything is a civil war, nothing is.

If Sarajevo made explicit how the new emerging contours of civil war would be written in ethnic terms, it had already been shown in Somalia, Mexico and later Rwanda how the very idea of a civil war was no longer bound to single movements whose sole aim was the capture of the state. Such unbounded violence went global with 9/11, which revealed the utter nihilism of certain ethnic doctrines. It also showed how the lines between race, religion and political beliefs are far from homogenised.

Political violence has since been very much driven by ethnic division, which speaks to a problem that is far more expansive than reductive explanations that focus on race. Of course, there are some overlaps between race and ethnicity, but they are not mutually exclusive. A failure to recognise this means we fail to properly understand the causes and the solutions.

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How Britain ignored its ethnic conflict

By Aris Roussinos

Three decades on from the violence in Yugoslavia, the world is undeniably a different place. The UK political landscape is notably a world away from how it looked in the early Nineties, divided as we have become by all the social media tensions that, as recent days have shown, actually makes violence easier to provoke by non-uniformed and misinforming online generals. This has been matched by the Americanisation of our political system, where performativity — including the performativity of violence and outrage — has replaced substance and where the complex lines of identity and ethnicity have been reduced to crass caricatures based on neat categories of race, sex, gender and whatever other category we care to impose.

The category of race, for example, in itself tells us little about a person’s privileges or political and religious beliefs. That is why counter-narratives around “whiteness” are also unhelpful here; just as they are useless in explaining why many black and Asian people in the US support Donald Trump, or why Enrique Tarrio ,who is of Afro-Cuban descent, became the chairman of the neo-fascist organisation Proud Boys. We should not forget their cos-play riot on Capitol Hill, for what that pantomime showed was such movements today really don’t expect to be able to take on the state. Instead, their enemy are other Americans who have a different vision of what being American actually looks like.

Unlike in Britain, the idea of a possible civil war there has been part of mainstream discussion in America for some time now. Indeed, what marked out Alex Garland’s compelling film Civil War was precisely its plausibility. Garland revealed one of the truisms of a civil war, where its experience is never universally shared. A civil war has never meant that every street is a battlefield. The violence is always concentrated. Witnessing the streets ablaze in Belfast at the weekend should remind us of this. That city, which for many impartial observers looked on the precipice of a civil war for a number of decades, was also liveable even as the ethnic divisions required the physical construction of walls. Belfast also shows how the lines of ethnic divisions are never static but take on new forms.

How should we respond to it? Many have dismissed those engaging in the weekend’s violence by emphasising its thuggery and blaming the likes of Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage. While I sympathise with this instinct — the criminality was parasitic and abhorrent — it shouldn’t come at the expense of understanding that it was also carried out in the name of a certain ethno-nationalistic vision. So, just as we asked “why do they hate us?” in the aftermath of 9/11, so we must now ask “why is there so much hatred in Britain?”.

A staple explanation in studies of global conflicts since the mid-Nineties has been the idea that poverty is the greatest single cause for violence. Indeed, the edict that underdevelopment was dangerous has been advanced by every single international organisation and humanitarian group tasked with mitigating conflict and violence. Certainly, areas of Britain are desperately poor at the moment. And they have been suffering from the fallouts of years of austerity, the impact of Brexit and the costs of the Covid lockdown. That the anger is spilling out from those areas is cause enough for deeper reflection. But we should not fall into the trap of reducing everything to a question of economy.

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Port Talbot and the suicide of Wales

By Brad Evans

One of the best books written on the rise of extremism and how a small minority can change the course of history is Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which was published as Hitler was coming to power in 1933. Reich encouraged us to move beyond simplistic explanations for fascism’s rise. Instead, he asked us to question the fascist that exists within each of us. We can all learn to desire power and violence, and seek to belittle, shame and intimidate others. Fascism as such doesn’t solely reside on the Right or the Left of the political spectrum. Any identity or ethnicity can become fascistic, just as any identity or ethnicity can become peaceful and welcoming.

Despite the protestations of radical moral puritans, then, there is nothing inherently fascistic about Englishness, the flag of St George, or any other symbolic accoutrements. It is instead about how they are mobilised and whether they are appropriated in the service of violent means.

History needs heeding. As Reich showed, once fascistic desires are liberated, that is when politics tends to get reduced to questions of survival. We saw this repeatedly played out over the weekend as narratives of survival, from the protection of our children to the preservation of a way of life, resulted in the open assault upon police officers and burning of libraries and advice centres. Such calls to violence thrive in febrile moments when questions of sovereignty are translated into everyday concerns. And more dangerous still, the freeing of that violence creates the very conditions in which rigid positions have to be chosen.

Thankfully, Britain is not an armed society, and its violence is mostly contained. But that shouldn’t mean that can’t change. Across the world, civil wars have been raging in the name of revitalised ethnic divisions, which have only required a single spark to set entire societies and nations ablaze. Britain is contending with these forces, and they could become much worse. It would be foolish to believe that we are too civilised to ever let that happen. The potential for civil war is written into the DNA of all ethnic conflicts — and, like a sleeping demon, once its fires are lit there’s no knowing where it will spread.

The flags are different on this side of the police line. An unlikely mixture of Irish tricolours and Union flags prevails. At the very front, men hold a large banner reading “Coolock Says No”, while others waft a large Israeli flag around. One guy holds a small cross hastily fashioned from cardboard. Masked young men zip about the place, but there are people of all ages here, including young children. Wandering through the throng, I pass two women and a girl of three or four, all identically attired in Barbie pink. “Get ‘em out, get ‘em out,” sings the girl in her soft southern accent, smiling a lovely smile.

An occasional missile is lobbed at the Unity Over Division crowd, mostly water balloons filled with god-knows-what. Twice, the flat reports of fireworks echo off surrounding buildings. “Get ‘em out” is the favoured chant, though as time passes and the crowd swells, the front ranks segue into “Oh Tommy Robinson”. From the other side of the police lines comes “Nazi scum off our streets” and a solitary, rather prim cry of “Degenerates!”

Eventually, the Unity protest disperses. The anti-immigration rally advances, hundreds of people heading across Donegall Square. Two men face off in front of City Hall, footing backwards and forwards on the neat lawn, until one is pulled back by friends. The crowd moves down onto Bradbury Place and walks south. The protest’s goal is the Islamic Centre on University Road. A woman in her 60s asks how far away it is. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes’ walk. “Awk shit,” she says, rolling her eyes.

Police have sealed off the approach to the Islamic Centre with a solid line of land rovers. The crowd rolls on down a parallel road. This is Botanic Avenue, a pleasant street of bookshops, bars, cafes, and restaurants. Word spreads that the Sahara shisha bar has been attacked. Soon afterwards, a group of young men start dragging large restaurant waste bins out into the middle of the road. The makeshift barricade is a decision born of pure instinct, like beavers building a dam. There’s nothing to barricade against just now — there are no police around — and the young men shrug and move on.

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By Aris Roussinos

The crowd pauses for 10 minutes. Without the Islamic Centre there is no goal. “Is this the way to the mosque?” asks one man plaintively. Then someone moves over to the door of Duke’s Hotel and gives it a kicking. A new plan becomes apparent. Hotels suspected of housing immigrants will do. Shortly afterwards, a young man is using a café table to hammer at the front doors of an Ibis hotel on University Street. The glass doors hold. A veteran in the crowd advises: “Get that hood up.”

The mood changes along with the plan. Numbers are dropping. Many of those who were just along for the ride have melted away. Some guy in a red tracksuit swaggers past. He gestures to my notebook and shouts: “See your book? You shove it up your hole you fucking balloon.” I turn a page and write: “Yng guy red trkst = C ur bk? U shv it up ur hole u fkn bln.” Then I slip it in my pocket.

The crowd moves on. We’re deep in the Holylands now. This locale is full of students during term time, but it’s pretty quiet on a muggy August afternoon. The area isn’t a natural choice for a march — it’s too cramped, too embarrassingly residential. It transpires that the man directing the crowd is from Dublin and has got a bit lost. His unorthodox route seems to have totally blindsided the police, who are nowhere to be seen.

I get chatting to a woman from Portsmouth. “I’ve lived in Belfast 14 years. But I’ve come along today for those three girls, really. The police should be protecting us.” For every hooded youngster there is someone like her, eager to share their sense that society’s machinery has failed at its deepest, most intricate level. Police arrive soon after. Young men stage a happy hardcore dance-off in front of the improvised wall of land rovers. One man gambols over and briefly plants his tricolour on an armoured bonnet before spinning away, delighted. It’s the last Irish flag I’ll see today.

The home stretch doesn’t last long. What remains of the crowd emerges blinking onto the Lower Ormeau Road. This is a broadly Nationalist area, and it doesn’t take long for a counter-protest to form up. Within minutes, men and women have confronted the marchers. The police, still playing catch-up, manage to establish a line between the two groups before the situation degenerates into a street brawl. The locals waste no time in giving the police line a piece of their mind. “How did they get so far up without youse stopping them?” asks one woman, incredulous. “I don’t know how you live with yourselves, protecting these racists,” says a man. At the street corner, an old lady asks for advice on how to get home. She looks so small in her blue anorak. A woman puts her arm around the old lady and they plan a route together.

Soon after that, it’s all over. The few remaining marchers — there can be barely 30 or 40 of them left by now — chant some Loyalist paramilitary acronyms before walking off into the afternoon. A line of riot police sweeps the road behind them. I follow along, wondering what to make of it all. I stop next to a Holiday Inn. Someone’s smashed the window, and a man is already sweeping fragments of glass from the floor.

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On the bus home, I look at my phone. Apparently North and South, Nationalist and Unionist, have come together at last. Noted scholar of Irish affairs, Darren Grimes, is among the first to declare a new dawn of cooperation and unity. There are many more like him, convinced that one protest and a handful of TikToks are of great historical moment. Perhaps they’re right. It is certainly true that the crowd I witnessed on Donegall Place was an unusual one. I’ve never seen the Tricolour flown alongside the Union flag in that way. And it was interesting to move among the crowd and hear the accents flip from Northside Dublin to Belfast to Kildare to rural Antrim.

But it is also true that this variety fell away as the day progressed. The march’s final flourish on the Lower Ormeau Road, a mere three and a half hours from the demonstration’s start, saw a swift and instinctive reversion to sectarian business as usual. And the rioting on Sandy Row later that evening, where a man’s supermarket was immolated, was hardly a hands-across-the-border affair. If anything, it echoed the riots of 2021, which took place in exactly the same location, and which were caused in part by the behaviour of Nationalist politicians during Covid.

A local genius for symbolism — its creation, its transmission, and its redeployment to previously unimagined ends — should not be confused for life as it is actually lived. Nor should it be assumed that such symbols belong to one group or sub-group alone; nothing could be further from the truth. I didn’t see a new Ireland on Saturday. I saw two crowds separated by a thin line of police, shouting at one another on an August afternoon.

The conservationist who found Belfast so nightmarish was called Charles Brett. A lawyer by trade, he was invited to join the National Trust’s Northern Ireland committee in 1956. When Brett asked the committee chairman what books he should read on Belfast’s architectural history, he was told that no such books existed. So he decided to write one himself. After eight years of research, Brett’s Buildings of Belfast was published in 1967. The work was completed “only just in the nick of time”.

Brett was referring to more than the Troubles; in fact, he complained that “the demolition men rival the bombers in coarse heartlessness”. His real ire was reserved for developers who razed historic buildings that might have been repurposed for modern use. He nursed a particular dislike for the various concrete shoeboxes imposed on Belfast in the Sixties: “Happily, many office blocks of this period are already suffering from the defects of their shoddiness, and, it may reasonably be hoped, will fall down soon.”

A portrait of Brett hangs in the offices of Ulster Architectural Heritage (UAH). I’m here to meet Sebastian Graham, the society’s Heritage at Risk Officer, one of the tiny number of people working to save Northern Ireland’s historic buildings from oblivion. UAH is based in the Old Museum Building, a handsome Greek Revival edifice built in 1831, filled with winding staircases and galleried salons. The place was used as an arts centre in the Nineties and still has an intact dressing room, the walls covered with mirrors and posters for Joe Orton plays. Today, the Old Museum Building is tired but magnificent. It’s appropriate that UAH is quartered in something of a project. After all, as Graham tells me, “vacancy is the big killer”.

UAH and other organisations have been fighting to preserve Northern Ireland’s built heritage for decades. There have been many successes. Hearth Historic Buildings Trust has restored numerous derelict properties, and is currently engaged in renovating Riddel’s Warehouse in Belfast, a project that has been ongoing since 2014. But despite the occasional “save”, Graham says that the overall situation is dire: “In Northern Ireland there’s more than 800 listed buildings at risk. That’s about 9% of our listed building stock. The figure in Scotland and Wales varies from 2% to 4%. So we’re essentially double the rest of the UK as to the [poor] condition of our built heritage.”

The last decade has been devastating for Northern Ireland’s architectural inheritance. In 2014, the government budget for the maintenance of historic buildings was £4.17 million. That pot was reduced to £500,000 in 2015 and has continued to shrink — Graham estimates that last year’s budget was in the region of £200,000. Today, the owner of a listed building can apply to the Roof and Window Repair scheme. This offers a maximum grant of £6,000, although thatched properties can be awarded double that. These piddling sums won’t cover the cost of meaningful repairs, especially when many projects require the expertise of specialist craftsmen. As Graham observes: “It’s not even a sticking plaster… Given the cost of everything with inflation, you’d barely get one or two windows done for that.”

Money isn’t the only problem. Foot-dragging developers present a serious threat to Belfast’s built heritage. The issue is exemplified by the Tribeca project, an urban renewal scheme designed to regenerate one of the city centre’s most dilapidated areas, a site of nearly 12 acres that contains a number of handsome Victorian buildings. Tribeca’s promotional video, two minutes of cod-poetic corporate guff voiced by Jamie Dornan, is slick and dead. The same appears true of Tribeca itself. Belfast City Council signed off on the scheme in January 2020, but nothing has happened since. The developers behind Tribeca, Castlebrooke Investments, have said that they are still trying to deliver a “commercially viable development”, and recently applied for a renewal of their planning application.

Meanwhile, the area has decayed further. Large stretches are dominated by empty shops, crumbling buildings and blank oblongs of scrub. Such dereliction leads to a decline in footfall, which in turn makes it considerably more difficult for the businesses that have managed to cling on. Graham singles out Keats and Chapman, a legendary second-hand bookshop on North Street, as an example of a business that has survived against the odds: “It’s the most beautiful array of books. But [people think] North Street, oh, it’s vacant, it’s all empty. You wouldn’t go near the place. Those wee independent businesses have really suffered from that, they’ve been the victim of this land banking.”

What’s bad for business is worse for historic buildings. The Assembly Rooms, built in 1769 and expanded in 1776, is arguably Belfast’s oldest public building. Sitting at the corner of Waring Street and North Street, this stuccoed Georgian pile presides over the “Four Corners”, the place from which all milestones from Belfast were once measured. Henry Joy McCracken and other leaders of the United Irishmen were court-martialled here in 1798. In later years it was used as a bank, before falling into disuse in 2000. Tribeca’s plans to turn the Assembly Rooms into a boutique hotel have failed to materialise. Now it lies derelict, its stained and peeling frontage nothing more than a home for weeds. Campaigners have called on Belfast City Council to intervene.

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If such an intervention comes, it will be at odds with a prevailing culture of inertia. Graham is sympathetic to the challenges faced by Belfast City Council, who already have responsibility for a large number of important and vulnerable buildings. But something must be done to save unique places like the Assembly Rooms and the Crumlin Road Courthouse. The answer is certainly not more legislation. A proposed dilapidation bill doesn’t excite Graham: “We’ve already got the legislation but we’re not using it, so why bring in more legislation if no one’s going to enforce it?” He points out that compulsory purchase orders to preserve built heritage have been on the books for years. Yet these powers have only been used once — back in 2007.

The bill will be introduced by the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA). This complicates matters. “DAERA have no say in historical built fabric, that’s Department for Communities. So we’ll have councils, we have the DfC, we’ll have DAERA… it’s a split responsibility and no one’s going to tackle the issue, no one’s going to grasp it. And you wait another 10 years and nothing has changed.” Graham likens the situation to an awkward dance, with boys on one side of the room and girls on the other, both groups refusing to take action.

But turning up to a dance is never enough; at some point you have to cross the floor. This is something that both Stormont and local government have consistently failed to do. Although Graham says that these issues are finally being discussed by politicians, it’s clear that the time for talk has passed. The collapse of the Executive between 2017-2020 and 2022-2024, combined with the disruption of Covid, has meant that built heritage has been all but ignored by Stormont for years. Many irreplaceable buildings in Belfast — and Northern Ireland — will not survive another sustained period of neglect. A case in point is Hilden Linen Mill, a large and beautiful building ripe for redevelopment, which was gutted by a suspected arson attack last week.

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Buildings such as the Crumlin Road Courthouse and the Assembly Rooms are physical expressions of the city’s history. To lose them through indifference is a confession of sorts; a depressing admission that cultural amnesia might not be so bad after all. If that seems a little abstract, then there are more pragmatic reasons to preserve Belfast’s historic fabric. At a time when local government, architects, and developers are consumed by questions of sustainability, it makes sense to repurpose existing structures rather than replace them with new buildings, some of which will be replaced in turn within a few short decades. This regeneration would benefit practitioners of traditional building skills, and provide a stimulus for more young people to learn these important crafts. Tourism is a consideration, too — few visitors to Northern Ireland come for the new-build apartment buildings and plate-glass office blocks.

As Graham says, “There needs to be greater impetus and greater incentives to make use of the historic built fabric because it’s here, it’s ready for use. It might be in bad shape but it’s the morally right thing to do and it’s the environmentally better thing to do. And that can then transform those areas that have been neglected over time.”

It is depressing that such pleas have to be made at all. Very little appears to have changed since Brett’s time. If anything, the state of Northern Ireland’s built heritage seems worse than ever before. There is little government money and no government action. A small number of passionate people do what they can against Stormont’s indifference; few believe next month’s election will change anything. As a parting shot, I ask what Brett would make of the current situation. Graham’s mouth tightens into a wry smile. “I don’t think he’d be too impressed.”

But there is something elemental, beyond rational considerations, in the appeal of the Irish cottage. Few were the Irish emigrant homes of a certain era that didn’t have a framed farmstead hanging on the sitting room wall, whitewash sparkling against the Kodacolor green. A symbol of a simpler, harder lifestyle, simultaneously fetishished and spurned, the Irish farmstead, built from rubble from its surrounding fields, conveys deep, ambivalent realms of meaning, quite distinct from and darker than the prettily uncomplicated charms of the chocolate-box English cottage. Empty farmhouses, which in England would each be spick and span with Farrow and Ball, litter Northern Ireland’s countryside like abandoned crime scenes. In Ireland, the rural cottage still lurks in the imagination like a half-remembered, troubling dream.

It is no surprise, then, that houses loom large in Ireland’s cultural production. Indeed, it is only partly an exaggeration to say that Irish literature — at least in English — consists of a collection of domestic metaphors. In an island whose history has been defined by contested land ownership, houses dominate the country’s literary landscape like an Anglo-Irish “Big House” overlooking its demesne.

From the very birth of the Anglo-Irish novel, with Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and The Absentee (1812), the Big House of the landlords was presented as a mouldering, moss-streaked metaphor for the country’s social and political order, a literary premonition of the gloomily decaying wrecks of the 20th-century Anglo-Irish novel, their shrubbery haunted by rebellious tenants and doomed to fiery dissolution. Even Bram Stoker, giving his imagination the freest rein, was compelled to conjure up a landlord, surrounded by superstitious peasants, vacating his crumbling mansion in a box of his native soil, while casting an acquisitive eye on the London property market.

On the other side of Ireland’s great political divide, the idealised peasant cottage of early 20th-century Irish nationalism, successor to the squalid 19th-century tenant cabin, marks the point at which improved economic conditions following the Famine laid the foundations for Ireland’s separation from its negligent neighbouring freeholder. The tidy, homely cottage became the moral and political contrast to the ramshackle and disorderly Big House, just as independent Ireland was to draw from its own native folk resources in establishing itself as a nation once again.

But one man’s bucolic fantasy is another’s nightmare. Ulster Unionist election posters contrasted the tidily prosperous farmsteads of the Protestant statelet with the tumbledown thatched cabins of De Valera’s Republic — relying on cultural tropes that, ironically, only make sense within an Irish context. The dominant stage of post-independence Realist literature — the isolated Midlands farmhouse ruled by a fallible, domineering father — provided a handy metaphor for writers chafing against the stultifying claustrophobia of mid-20th century Ireland. In today’s neurotically globalising Republic, scene of a housing crisis that makes Britain’s Generation Rent look comparatively blessed, the abandoned estates of the Celtic Tiger boom fulfil a similar purpose: they are vacant symbols of a country caught between outward-looking aspirations and the material reality of a marginal country on Europe’s westernmost fringe.

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But here in Northern Ireland, a century after the border uncurled itself across Ulster’s rainy country lanes, this domestic metaphor has its own specific, harder edge. As bookseller-turned-writer Alexander Poots observes in The Stranger’s House, his excellent new book on Northern Irish writing, David Trimble instinctively returned to the trope in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, proclaiming that “‘Ulster Unionists, fearful of being isolated on the island, built a solid house, but it was a cold house for Catholics. And northern Nationalists, although they had a roof over their heads, seemed to us as if they meant to burn the house down.” A solid house built on uncertain ground, now Northern Ireland’s knife-edge demographic balance is shifting back in turn, looking to wash the state’s foundations away with it.

The politics and culture of Northern Ireland, Britain’s neglected stepchild over the water, are after all defined by one great building project, 400 years ago. Until the early 17th-century plantation of British Protestant settlers, Ulster was the wildest of Ireland’s four provinces, the last holdout of the old Gaelic order, and the least influenced by English culture. Over the course of a century, reshaped by its new population, it became the most distinctively British corner of the island, farms and sturdy grey market towns, in mainland style, blooming like mushrooms on Ulster’s levelled woodlands. Like a family’s private ways of speech, the shared dialect of its two peoples is still rich with the expressive Germanic vocabulary of the Scots colonists: people still hoke and boke, they gulder and gurn in the linguistic residue of “the Hamely Tongue”. Forced into loveless cohabitation by history, the province’s two nations have explored their predicament, in literature, through the image of the uneasily shared home.

In Reading in the Dark (1996), the Catholic writer Seamus Deane layers two oppressive domestic metaphors on top of each other: the claustrophobic Derry two-up, two-down where family life is weighed down by dark secrets, and the stolen farmhouse just across the border in Donegal, where a life of bucolic freedom and contentment lies unfairly out of reach. In the Monaghan writer Eugene McCabe’s cycle of fiction set across the border in Northern Ireland’s Fermanagh, the uneasy cohabitation of Catholic and Protestant finds expression in a lush and lurid Ulster Gothic: in Siege (1973), IRA gunmen hold an Anglo-Irish gentry family hostage in their Big House, finding uncomfortable intimacy in their unwillingly shared predicament; in Death and Nightingales (1992), the Catholic stepdaughter of a cuckolded Protestant landlord plots his murder, before being betrayed in turn by his devious Fenian tenant. Most explicitly, in Bill Morrison’s A Love Song for Ulster trilogy (1994), the Catholic Kate, abandoned by her mother as the border closed, is trapped in unwilling domesticity with the Protestant John, prisoner in a cold and isolated Northern farmhouse.

As a consequence of this troubled cohabitation, Poots observes, throughout its century-long existence Northern Irish literature “has seen writer after writer grasp for an elusive home. Inevitably they fail, and that failure becomes the subject of their work. They are all inhabitants of the disappearing island, tenants of the Strangers’ House.” Perhaps it is natural, then, that an unstable hold on uncertain ground pervades much of the province’s writing, a persistent sense that there are stranger things lurking beneath Ulster’s stolid surface. In Northern Irish writing, the hamely always threatens to become unheimlich.

Poots opens with a portrait of three Belfast writers — C.S. Lewis, Forrest Reid, and Louis MacNeice — and the comfortable and unhappy red-brick bourgeois homes that shaped their imaginations. Like their homeland, in their infancy “all had nightmares so memorable that they seemed worthy of record decades after their occurrence”, Poots notes, and “all three men described their childhood nightmares in their respective memoirs”. The triad are strangely interchangeable, Poots observes: “All were Protestants, and while some were more comfortable than others, all were vastly better off than the average Irishman. All had black dreams, all became writers. All knew the dark well.” And like Carson, the statelet’s sceptical founder, all three were repelled by the Loyalist culture of their tribe, “the marching bands, the sashes and banners, the great bonfires lit at midnight on the Twelfth of July”. Lewis, who would write that “if I ever get interested in politics, I shall probably be a nationalist”, described his distaste as simply a “natural repulsion to noisy drum‐beating, bullying Orangemen”.

Instead, for Lewis, in the dim afterglow of Yeats’s Celtic Twilight, escape was to be found in fantasy worlds, a hidden realm where time is so distorted that the ordinary human lifespan extends disorientatingly into mythicised, glorious history. Though Poots notes laconically that “not many people would associate Narnia with Ireland”, this parallel is surely inescapable. As Lewis would write in Surprised by Joy, “the country I grew up in had everything to encourage a romantic bent, had indeed done so ever since I first looked at the unattainable Green Hills through the nursery window”.

Explicitly transposing his beloved Oxford on the Mourne Mountains and Donegal, Narnia was a fantasy Ulster for Lewis, a land of “roaring waterfalls and mossy rocks and echoing caverns”, of “heathery mountains” and “windy slopes alight with gorse bushes”. For MacNeice, who “always thought of himself as Irish, a visitor to the English zoo”, escape from middle-class Belfast was sought in fantasies of Gaelic peasant authenticity, and his dubious claim that “my relations are still living in mud‐floored cottages in the West of Ireland”. And Reid in turn, that rare thing, an early 20th-century Ulster Protestant gay writer, found release in a lush, Bohemian fiction which, Poots remarks, fits “none of the stereotypes associated with Ulster Protestantism: they are queer, allusive, beautiful, and fantastical. And yet, despite everything, he was a Northern Irish Protestant novelist, and his books reflect his culture and his class.”

This yearning of the stereotypically matter-of-fact Ulster Protestant for the fantastical is a thread that runs through modern Northern Irish fiction, and Poots could perhaps make more of it than he does. Another recent book, 2021’s The Black Dreams: Strange stories from Northern Ireland, foregrounds the country’s under-analysed literary preoccupation with the weird and eerie, making the implicit explicit. In each of the stories, domestic life becomes unsettled by hidden worlds lying just at the edge of ours, by the intrusion of the old ways and a history that refuses forgetting. Indeed, perhaps the singular distinctive trait of the country’s best current writers, such as Antrim’s Jan Carson, is a magical realist sensibility now largely alien to their southern counterparts.

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Across the border, the long shadow of literary Modernism has congealed in Sally Rooney’s affectless, Xanax prose, making her a suitable literary avatar for a country rushing headlong into an increasingly contested postmodern internationalism. In contrast, Carson’s unsettling engagement with Irish folk traditions, her pagan sensibility, rooted in the soil and lurking beneath working-class Protestant community life — the literary equivalent of the Fairy Tree at the heart of Belfast’s Loyalist Sandy Row — would be so unfashionable among Dublin writers, still eager to shake off the shackles of tradition, as to be unwritable. History’s separation of North and South perhaps permits a critical engagement, in Northern writers, with a lost sense of Irishness, the bifurcated insider-outsider perspective of the anthropologist, both at home and not in either culture. In one of the many contradictions typifying Northern Ireland, it is the explicit Irishness of Carson’s writing that separates her from the Republic.

If the singular characteristic of Northern Irish prose is its yearning for the fantastical, its poetic counterpart is perhaps a shrewd and unromantic, even tormented relationship with the land. “Northern Ireland is the result of an argument about land,” Poots notes, “an argument conducted over four long centuries”, and this stubborn rootedness adheres to the best Ulster poetry like wet clay. In the work of farmer-poets like Seamus Heaney and John Montague, both brought up in smallholdings in Northern Ireland’s rural, Catholic west, small farms, hard soil and deep history intertwine to create a distinctive imaginative space. Poots writes compellingly, often in passages of great beauty, of the nature writing tradition in Irish-language poetry, observing that “if a sense of homelessness and dislocation forms one pillar of northern writing, then the natural world forms the other. Indeed fields, trees, and birds have often supplied the language through which writers can express darker truths.”

Yet the land itself may express other, happier resolutions: for the great Belfast Protestant poet John Hewitt, who deserves greater analysis than Poots’s excellent survey of Ulster writing gives him, the same Antrim countryside that inspired Lewis grounded him in a sense that he, too, belonged to this contested soil, where though “once alien here my fathers built their house/claimed, drained and gave the land the shapes of use”, so that “because of all the buried men/in Ulster clay”, he is “as native in my thought as any here”. Poots quotes Tom Paulin’s poetic lament of the Ulster Protestant seaman in London as proof of “the uncertainty at the heart of Ulster Unionism — the terrible suspicion that they are mired between Catholic Ireland and indifferent Britain, foreigners everywhere”. But the Roman settler in Hewitt’s more hopeful 1950 poem The Colony instead derives from his perception that “we would be strangers in the Capitol” a belief that time and shared love of the land may change relations “if not to kin, to co-inhabitants, as goat and ox may graze in the same field/and each gain something from proximity”.

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This ameliorating influence of the land pervades Belfast, too, MacNeice’s “city built on mud” where, as Poots notes, “the smell of silage and cow dung still wafts across the city when the wind is right”, and where the street art, unlike the mainland, displays fat bramble hedges and woodland paths as well as the paramilitary murals so beloved of Troubles tourists. From the centre of Belfast, you can see the hedgerows and green fields of hill farms overlooking the postindustrial cityscape; mist-shrouded mountains loom oppressively over the terraced red-brick streets, the grim majesty of the land itself our reminder we are not in Manchester or Liverpool. Like the inner city’s sectarian murals fading into the Alliance Party posters of the prosperous leafy suburbs, Ulster’s countryside softens Belfast’s brick-sharp edges.

In his conclusion, Poots declares that “a tribal writer will never produce great work”. Instead, “the best northern writers have rejected the answers that their respective communities offer up… Perhaps this is the root of the homesick quality that, for me, defines Northern Irish writing” — “where home is revealed to be a delusion.” But perhaps what Poots interprets as loss and homelessness can also be a strange liberation: by belonging to both Britain and Ireland, Northern Ireland ultimately belongs to neither. For writers, condemned by temperament to view their home society from the outside, looking in, such ambiguity can be productive, as the vigorous imaginative possibilities displayed by Ulster’s new writing proves.

As with the shrewd and slightly roguish inhabitants of Northern Ireland’s border villages — my own new home — with their pocketfuls of Euros, at ease in both societies, or the best of both worlds Sunak strains to convince Unionists that the Windsor Agreement offers, the ambiguity detested by Belfast politicians may yet be a profitable wellspring. For all its political uncertainty, or perhaps because of it, Northern Ireland’s cultural output possesses a complex, unaffected sense of place and continuity distinct from, and perhaps increasingly foreign to, both the British mainland and the Republic. A traditional Ulster farmhouse has no foundations, built directly on the heavy soil: but it is no less solid or homely for that, and will sit sturdily on its squat fieldstone haunches long after the political certainties of today have washed away.

Hesitantly at first, then loudly, the crowd sang God Save The King, clapping and waving their own flags. “We’re part of the Loyalist Shankill Road, you’ll not get a place anywhere that’s more loyal to the crown,” Janet McGregor, a middle-aged woman wearing a slightly unsettling King Charles mask and coronation robes told me. “We had to fight hard to stay part of being Britain, so we did, whereas those over there now [in Britain], they don’t seem to care. Look at Scotland, trying to get away. Until the death, isn’t that right? You’ll have to kill us first.”

But the passionate attachment of working-class Loyalist communities to the United Kingdom and the monarchy, so exotically performative to mainland eyes, is not reciprocated by Westminster. The Conservative party relied on the support of the DUP, the province’s largest Unionist party, to push Brexit through, but Brexit has had the unintended consequence, for many Unionists who supported it, of bringing down their own devolved government and further isolating Northern Ireland. On the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, a poll revealed that 62% of Unionists oppose the return of devolved government until Johnson’s Northern Ireland Protocol is completely scrapped.

But London wants to move on, and is increasingly impatient with the DUP’s refusal to return to Stormont, warning that abstention from power sharing is “the biggest single threat to the union”. In an effort to restore the relationship between Westminster and Brussels, the Sunak government recently deployed the new king’s regal stardust to obtain the Windsor agreement, a ploy condemned by the DUP’s Nigel Dodds as politicising the monarchy, and resented by local Loyalist activists.

“The Windsor agreement is the Belfast agreement [Good Friday Agreement] renamed, it’s the same,” Julie Davidson of the ACT NGO, created to integrate former UVF paramilitaries into civilian life, told me, “and that was a blindside to put that Windsor in there. People in the community feel exactly the same as me, it’s a failed agreement. I voted for the Good Friday Agreement 25 years ago, but would I do it over again? No. Bring the whole lot down.”

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If power sharing resumed in Stormont, Sinn Fein would lead Northern Ireland’s government as the country’s largest party, as King Charles himself affably noted to Sinn Fein’s Vice President and Northern Ireland leader, Michelle O’Neill. The oddly warm relationship between the King and the republican leader is remarkable, not least because his own beloved uncle was assassinated by the IRA. Yet Charles has worked hard to advance normalisation between Britain and Ireland — his 1995 visit to the Republic was the first official visit by a royal since the country’s independence, laying the groundwork for the Queen’s historic 2011 visit — and it may already be paying dividends.

“I’m very proud the way he’s met with Republicans,” Janet’s friend Jacqueline told me beneath the mural, “I’m proud that he done that. It showed them’uns [Nationalists], I’d love them’uns to take their seats in the House of Commons, if they’re genuine about trying to move on, that’s something that would have to be asked.” Yet Charles’s outreach to a Nationalist community which rejects his role has already met with new reciprocation from Sinn Fein, eager to position itself as the natural party of government for all of Northern Ireland. Michelle O’Neill’s surprise announcement that she would attend the coronation — as a mark of respect for Northern Ireland’s Unionists — was well received by some Loyalists gathered under the mural. “I feel sorry about the hunger strikers’ families to be honest with you,” says Jacqueline. “Them people died for their cause and the next minute she goes away to London and wants publicity for votes.”

Indeed, it’s perhaps O’Neill’s own Nationalist powerbase that looks most sceptically at her attendance of the coronation. On nearby Northumberland Street, the Peace Gates — the optimistically-named metal barriers built to keep the two communities apart — divide the Protestant Shankill from the Catholic Falls Road. Murals to dead UVF volunteers and the fallen of the First World War Ulster Division suddenly give way to memorials to dead republican militants and lurid expressions of support for various Third World liberation movements. At the An Chultúrlann centre, an Irish-language cultural hub, Gerry Carroll of the Republican socialist People Before Profit party told me that O’Neill’s attendance was a misstep. “Somebody who classes themselves as a democrat should not be endorsing and entertaining the most reactionary elements in British politics,” he told me, “so I think it’s a real shame that Michelle O’Neill and others have endorsed that rotten institution. As soon as they offered that, it wasn’t enough for the DUP, they were clamouring for Union Jacks on every public building, so Sinn Fein are conceding ground to the DUP and others’ narrative.”

On West Belfast’s Catholic Divis Street, two PSNI officers sat bored in their parked patrol car watching an anti-coronation protest stretched out along the road. Pádraic MacCoitir, former Republican prisoner and organiser for the far-Left nationalist Lasair Dhearg faction, was giving a speech railing against the “imperialist rule” of a “parasite” king, but reserved his greatest ire for Sinn Fein. “Twenty-five years after the Good Friday Agreement, we find ourselves faced with the spectacle of two former Republicans standing in front of a king, acting as Viceroys of Empire,” he told the 50 or so demonstrators, waving red flags and placards saying “Not Our King” in Irish and English as beeping cars rushed past. “Their presence is an endorsement of the very forces that oppressed and terrorised our people for centuries, this is a betrayal of everything that we have fought for.” But asked whether his anger was shared in the wider community, MacCoitir was more equivocal. “Well obviously Sinn Fein, politically — you can see all the posters about — they’re very strong,” he told me. “It’s wrong what they’re doing, it’s completely and utterly wrong. But will it affect them in the forthcoming council elections? I don’t know. I really don’t care to be honest, but it could. Who knows?”

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Ireland will always be divided

By Tom McTague

But it’s unlikely that Sinn Fein, now the largest party on both sides of the Irish border, will be electorally troubled by O’Neill’s gesture: if anything, it marks a growing confidence that history is on their side. Back on the Shankill Road, there’s a weary sense that Northern Ireland’s Nationalists are now on top, have better PR and London’s ear. The sight of Sinn Fein’s leadership seated so prominently at the ceremony highlights that the party has now become, in its own way, part of a Westminster establishment whose authority it doesn’t formally recognise. “The Republican movement seem to have better spokespeople and people [in Westminster] are more sympathetic towards them,” Matt, a drinker in the Shankill’s Rex Bar, bedecked with Union Jacks and portraits of the king, told me. “I don’t think it matters if it’s a Conservative government or a Labour government, if it suited them, they’d do away with the six counties and be happy with a united Ireland, they see it as a burden. It’s like an unrequited love, it doesn’t matter what we do, we’re taken for granted and ignored.”

This sense of disaffection will only grow as Northern Ireland braces for savage cuts in Government services to fill an £800m budget black hole. Already the poorest part of the United Kingdom, with the country’s worst transport infrastructure and longest NHS waiting lists, now the province’s Department for Infrastructure is warning it will be forced to limit road maintenance and turn off street lights to save money. The greatest perceived trump card for the Union, Northern Ireland’s superior public services to the Republic, are now threatened by the looming budget cuts, the effects of which will further entrench political divisions within Unionism over power sharing. With the DUP blocking Stormont, and the Unionist vote divided over the way forward, even on the Shankill there’s a grudging respect for Sinn Fein as efficient political operators.

“The streets here is alive with rats, them politicians knock on your door for votes and then you’ll never see them,” Steven, a young local, told me as he puffed on a cigarette outside the Shankill’s Royal Bar. “I’ve seen people in Shankhill Road going to Sinn Fein for housing problems, because at least they’re working, and they seem to resolve the problems. I’ve known many Protestant people go down to Catholic councillors to resolve their problems, it’s shameful to be doing it but it’s the only way.” Steven’s friend Nicola, an NHS worker, agreed. “There’s no government here,” she told me, “I’ve never seen Belfast so run down. Why are we paying for them to sit at home? We’re all working and they’re getting paid for nothing, and now they’re going to turn off our street lights.”

Divided between those who want Stormont restored and those who want it abolished entirely, working-class Unionists in Belfast are on the back foot, and increasingly disillusioned with Northern Ireland’s dysfunctional political system. For all that the coronation provided an opportunity for the community to coalesce and demonstrate their passionate attachment to the Union and the monarchy, their fractured politics leave them voiceless in Westminster, and an irritation to a British Government whose reciprocal loyalty seems ever more uncertain. O’Neill’s presence at the crowning of the man she hopes will be Northern Ireland’s last king was also a coronation of her own, establishing Sinn Fein as the province’s next party of government, and reframing Loyalist attachment to the monarchy as a harmless cultural quirk of a people she is destined to lead rather than a meaningful political identity. In Northern Ireland, so misleadingly similar to mainland Britain and yet so utterly different, the glittering spectacle of the Coronation took place in a Westminster that looks to be moving ever further away.

The cemetery is all that is left of my connection to Leitrim — that and my surname. In this tiny patch of Ireland, far from home, lie various McTigues and McTeigeus, the ancestors who may have given us our name. But that link has been frayed in the churn of emigration and divorce, remarriage and death. Today, the banal truth is that I’m English, not Irish. All my immediate family were born in England. Everything I know and feel has been shaped in England. Like Joe Biden, my closest connection to Ireland is three generations ago. And yet, I’m English and he, as he claims, is Irish.

But don’t just take his word for it. Before the US President arrived in Dublin, the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, said how honoured he was to be welcoming Joe Biden “home” to Ireland; fifth cousins lined up to celebrate this homecoming; over the next few days, every sinew in the Republic will be strained to affirm the President’s Irishness. And why not? Not only is it wise to claim the most powerful man in the world as one of your own, doesn’t it make sense to greenwash those US corporate profits sloshing through Ireland?

Not that Biden is faking it. The President’s grandfather, Ambrose — whose father came to America from from Ireland in the 1850s — drummed it into the young Joe Jnr that he should remember “the best drop of blood in you is Irish”. The worst, you see, was English, which had dripped down through the generations on his father’s side. In his speech in Belfast yesterday, Biden even joked about this somewhat embarrassing revelation. 

Just as nations are no more than “imagined communities”, so too are diasporas. What is important is not the purity of Biden’s bloodline — a horrible, fascistic idea — but the strength of belief in the idea of Irish-Americanness. If enough people believe they are Irish-American, then Irish America exists not only in theory but in practice — a living reality with its own power that must be reckoned with in Belfast and London. Irish America votes and feels, and therefore has to be taken seriously. In the Seventies and Eighties, it funded the IRA. Today, it warns Britain there will be no trade deal should it abandon the Northern Irish Protocol.

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The real potency of the idea of Irish America is that it shapes not only how America sees Ireland but also how Ireland sees itself. “Biden comes with a vision of Irishness which is really an Irish American vision,” Kieran Cuddihy, an Irish radio presenter, told me. “It is quaint and twee — all comely maidens dancing at the crossroads.” 

When this caricature is ridiculed, though, the Irish bristle, as happened recently on Saturday Night Live, when two presenters pretended to be Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson on the Oscar’s red carpet. The pair spoke in unintelligible accents to the bafflement of their interviewers, who quipped: “Wow, and they haven’t even started drinking yet!” Farrell, who has been sober for years, later criticised the skit, as did the Irish government. And yet, the film for which Farrell was nominated has been slated for playing on these very same stereotypes. How’s that for meta? 

The Irish, Cuddihy explains, are happy to indulge that stereotype — but only when it suits them. “We won’t challenge it when Biden’s here,” he says. “In fact, we will lean into it.” As if to prove a point, the teetotal Biden was taken to a pub on the first night of his visit. And Biden plays up to it, describing himself as “the only Irishman you’ve ever met who’s never had a drink”. He has even joked:“I may be Irish but I’m not stupid.”

Hayek observed that tradition was not something constant, “but the product of a process of selection guided not by reason but by success”. So it is with Irishness. The Irishness on offer today works; it is successful. In August, tens of thousands of Americans will fly over to watch “the fighting Irish” of Notre Dame play a College football game in Dublin. As Cuddihy puts it, you can’t put on such a display of Irish-Americana and then tell them their version of Irishness is all wrong. The same is true of the St Patrick’s Day parade in Dublin, now more of an American tribute than an “authentic” celebration.

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Ireland will always be divided

By Tom McTague

And yet, much as this version of Irishness is successful for both Irish-American presidents and Ireland itself, there are costs to accommodating such unsubtle caricature. There is another Ireland that does not sit easily with Irish America, just as there is another Irish America that does not sit so easily in Ireland. And that is the one that originated in and is now largely confined to Northern Ireland.

By some estimates, more Irish Americans in the US are now Protestant than Catholic. This is partly because the descendants of Catholic Irish-Americans have since converted — such as the former Vice President Mike Pence, who became an Evangelical to his mother’s distress. For millions of others, though, it is ancestral, their roots reaching back not to a lost Ireland and the trauma of the famine, but to Ulster and a fierce Protestant individualism. It is one of the great ironies of this strange trans-Atlantic relationship, in fact, that in the most hardline of “loyalist” communities in Northern Ireland, murals still depict “Scotch-Irish” American founding fathers such as George Washington, perhaps the most famously disloyal subject in British history.

Biden cleverly nodded towards this heritage in his speech yesterday. “The pride in those Ulster Scots immigrants… who helped found and build my country, they run very deep.” His words were designed to soothe unionist criticism of his own perceived nationalist partisanship. “Men born in Ulster were among those who signed the Declaration of Independence in the United States, pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honour for freedom’s cause.” 

While the Irish America that President Biden embodies has proved resilient, the roots and influence of this other Irish America are just as profound. Back in that beautiful little cemetery in Leitrim there lies one gravestone after another telling the true story of Irish America: of men, woman and children born in Ireland, but spread throughout the world, from New York to London. Each life is its own story. This is the reality of Irish America: a story far more complicated than the one on display over the next few days.

The city then was an exciting upgrade from the drab post-war austerity of the east Midlands, a far cry from Belfast today. For the five years he lived there, Larkin liked the city and how it made him feel, describing its “draughty streets” and “faint archaic smell of dockland” in his poem The Importance of Elsewhere. These were the kinds of things which “prove me separate”. 

Yet, while this separateness could make him feel far from home, it also made him feel at ease. In Belfast, he was an outsider, but accepted as such. “Strangeness made sense,” he wrote, “The salt rebuff of speech, insisting so on difference, made me welcome.” It was almost harder being back in England.

“Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments
It would be much more serious to refuse.
Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.”

The poem captures something profound about the feelings of home and abroad which crash together in Northern Ireland. A friend of mine, an academic at Ulster University, told me that when he is in England, he feels much as Larkin did in Belfast: different but welcome. That contrasts starkly with how he feels when in the Republic of Ireland. While he is Irish and his grandfather was born in Dublin, he doesn’t feel at home there — its culture does not underwrite his existence. “England allows me to be Irish in my fashion,” he explained. “Ireland doesn’t. It wants to possess me, with no right to refuse.”

For many nationalists in Northern Ireland, the story is almost the opposite. For them, the Irishness of the south is their Irishness too, or at least something close to it. And it is not the Republic which seeks to possess them, but Britain. 

Visit Northern Ireland today and it is clear that it is not Irish nationalists going through an existential crisis about home and identity. It is Northern Ireland’s unionists who seem lost, trapped somewhere between elsewhere and home; nothing fixed, nothing secure, everything in flux. On one side, Irish nationalism is on the march, calm and confident, rich and secure, with a version of Irishness that isn’t theirs, singing “up the ‘Ra” as it goes; on the other, the Brits on the mainland seem ever willing to bargain away Northern Ireland as the price of the latest national project. The question unionism faces today is what to do about it.

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Were the DUP right all along?

By Tom McTague

Larkin looms large in my mind when I visit Belfast. It’s just his kind of cold, grey and “draughty” day as I wander down the Newtownards Road, past abandoned concrete scrub, old docks and “peace walls” still standing, a quarter of a century after the peace. 

At the East Belfast Constitutional Club, I meet Jamie Bryson, the public face of loyalism in Northern Ireland these days, along with two of his associates who do not want to be named. Bryson is a controversial figure in Northern Ireland: a regular on the media and close to the DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson but also regularly questioned about his links to the UVF — the banned paramilitary group the Ulster Volunteer Force. Bryson rejects such links as “outrageous”, insisting the UVF speak for themselves. Either way, Bryson, it strikes me, is a loyalist for our social media age, fighting the old cause with new tools.

The three of us venture upstairs to a hall which played host to the first loyalist rally against Johnson’s proposed Protocol back in October 2019. Three and a half years later, and the raw anger remains, undiluted by Sunak’s new deal.

Bryson lets his two associates do much of the talking: a briefing from the loyalist grassroots. “If the DUP accept this, they’re finished,” says the older hardliner, who was interned at Long Kesh during the Troubles. He is dismissive of Rishi Sunak’s latest agreement with the EU, the so-called Windsor Framework which the Prime Minister has claimed will give Northern Ireland a uniquely beneficial position in both the UK and EU markets. “People in England just don’t seem to get it,” he says. “This is not about money. It’s about the constitution. It’s about how safe we are in the United Kingdom.”

This older loyalist spent his entire life fighting this battle, but risked the anger of his own community in 1998 to vocally campaign for the Good Friday Agreement — something he now regrets. “Hundreds of my friends died to stay British,” he says. “We wanted peace, but there has been far too much given away to Republicanism. It has been give, give, give, but now we’ve got nothing left to give — we can’t compromise any further.” Bryson agrees, insisting that the Good Friday Agreement had been a mistake, giving Irish nationalism the tools to achieve all it wanted: “Equality was just a staging post to supremacy,” he says. Bryson’s other friend was, if anything, even more depressed by the situation. “Britain has done what we never thought was possible. They’ve kicked us out.” 

For other unionists that I know, however, such moroseness has gone too far. “You didn’t think this would happen? I mean, what the fuck?” snapped one when I described the interaction. “The big surprise is not that we ended up in this situation after Brexit, but that there has been enough concern in the Conservative party for them to claw the situation back this far.”

Here then is the challenge for the DUP and unionism today: keep fighting for a cause, no matter how lost, or try to own whatever partial victory they force from London and the EU? Northern Ireland’s history, after all, is not simply one of loyal rebellion to protect its “cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom”, as the Ulster Covenant put it in 1912. It is also one of constant forced compromise. The original loyalist insurrectionists, remember, didn’t even want Northern Ireland to exist — they were Irish unionists opposed to Home Rule. They accepted partition and a parliament in Belfast as the least worst option. They accepted a place apart, with its own prime minister and House of Commons when no other part of the UK had such devolution.

Today’s crisis is just another chapter in this long story: of a loyal Ulster locked in a permanent battle to protect its status, only to be forced to accept special treatment when it has no other option. Sunak’s settlement with the EU is now the settled will in Westminster, backed by both the Tory and Labour parties. Further opposition in Northern Ireland could wrestle a few more concessions — but it is hard to see anything substantial.

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Unionists have every reason to feel aggrieved. Northern Ireland has been placed in a different legal and economic order from the rest of the United Kingdom. Northern Irish businesses must be “trusted” to be able to move goods freely back and forth from the mainland. And all so that there would not be any checks whatsoever on trade between the UK and Republic of Ireland. 

Among many loyalists there is also outrage. They’re angry that this has come about — in their view — because Republicans raised the threat of violence should there be any land border at all. That is mirrored in the posters cropping up across Belfast with the image of Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and his warning from 2018 that “the possibility of a return to violence is very real”. Behind this warning, the posters’ producers had placed an image of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings carried out by the UVF in 1974, which killed 33 people. The message is clear, and menacing.

This is the backdrop against which the DUP must make its decision. Do they back Sunak’s deal as a marked improvement on Johnson’s — or reject it as a marked deterioration on what existed before Brexit? If they choose the former, they risk legitimising the very division of the UK which they exist to oppose, alienating their electoral base in the process. But if they choose the latter, refusing to go back into government with Sinn Fein, they risk delegitimising the very state they wish to preserve.

Yet Bryson does not represent all of unionism, let alone Northern Ireland. He is one part of the mix. Other leading figures in the DUP spot an opportunity, however much they might dislike the British Government’s handling of events. If Sunak’s deal really does mean “the best of both worlds” — inside the UK and EU markets — it makes it harder for nationalism to argue in the future that Northern Ireland should give up one of these worlds. Bluntly, if Northern Ireland can find a reasonable settlement that all sides of its sectarian divide can live with, there will be many ordinary people who will be happy enough to leave it at that, able to be Irish and British as they please, moving between elsewhere and home as it suits them. Unionism’s tactical defeat, in other words, might prove to be its strategic masterstroke, securing the union for longer than might have otherwise been the case.

This argument works only up to a point, though. A special arrangement for Northern Ireland may well stabilise the union in one sense, with a new argument to persuade the agnostic middle classes to stick with the constitutional status quo. But there will be a cost. If Sunak’s agreement gives Northern Ireland the best of both worlds, then Scotland will want to know why it can’t have a similar arrangement. Then so will England. It could destabilise the whole of the UK. 

Northern Ireland, though, is not a nation like Scotland. It is something more ambiguous: part of a bigger nation, but set apart. It remains unique. It is the only place in the Western world with the guaranteed right to secede and join another state should a simple majority so wish. Baked into Northern Ireland’s very existence is a constitutional uncertainty. Even the process and act of Irish unification is uncertain and deliberately so. Would Northern Ireland exist after voting to secede — in a union with the Republic — or would it simply be subsumed? No one knows.

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Scottish nationalism will survive Sturgeon

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Northern Ireland’s unionists do know, though, that the union they support is fragile, their constitutional rights only temporarily guaranteed, the existence of their nation up in the air. English people lecturing them should reflect that they have no such uncertainty. 

For now, unionism seems stuck. The DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson voiced his first criticisms of the Framework while in America this week, claiming it will “require further clarification, re-working and change”. But he has delayed making a decision, setting up a panel of grandees to report back on Sunak’s Windsor Framework by the end of the month — “organising the officer class before trying to get the soldiers in line”, as one observer put it to me. Donaldson has always been an arch devolutionist, unlike his one-time mentor Enoch Powell or other leading figures in the party in the Seventies and Eighties who believed Northern Ireland should lose its special status and simply be re-integrated back into the Westminster system. As a principle, in other words, Donaldson wants to see the restoration of the power-sharing institutions. His challenge, if he is minded to acquiesce to the arrangements now in place, is to find a way to bring unionism with him.

My trip to Northern Ireland suggests this will be almost impossible without a unionist split. The only question is how big that split will be.

This challenge is indicative of Northern Ireland’s very essence; one of constant uncertainty and ambiguity. The constitutional compromises required for stability only keep it in this state of instability, imposing upon those who want to keep it going a duty to find a way to make it work. Unionism’s fate, then, is to find itself bound in an endless struggle with a reality it doesn’t like, always seeking an unreachable settlement. 

Like Larkin on the deck of his ferry sailing to Belfast, Ulster unionism once again finds itself strapped to a boat travelling to unknown from lost. Its job is just to keep the ship floating on, guided by the light of that elsewhere, the only source of stability it has got.

Just as Tolstoy observed that “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, so it is with dysfunctional governments. Each is dysfunctional in its own way, though there are certain family resemblances between them — a certain shared form allowing you to characterise the ideal type. That Belfast was the latest stop on the Conservative Party’s leadership roadshow therefore has its own pleasing symmetry: Northern Ireland has been devoid of a functioning government since February, a status the rest of the country has since come to share. Of course, it’s always sad to see an entity of such promise torn apart by impenetrable feuds and bitter sectarian loyalties. But then that’s the Conservative Party for you.

As for Northern Ireland, the province suffers all the state failures of the mainland, only more so. The longest hospital waiting times in the UK, the highest rate of economically inactive people, the lowest productivity, and the least disposable income in the entire country. The region displays all the dysfunctions of Britain’s political economy boiled down to its purest essence, with its own extra dysfunctions thrown in for good measure. Rather than Northern Ireland surging forward to join the rest of the country in prosperity and good governance, as was once hoped, in its downward trajectory the rest of the country is now coming to resemble Ulster: the state’s centre is now barely distinguishable from the neglected periphery.

It cannot be claimed that the people of Belfast awaited with bated breath the arrival of Truss and Sunak, the two squabbling representatives of what is now less a political party than a trade union for affluent pensioners in southeast England. But beneath yesterday’s gloomy Ulster sky, six women waving Union flag placards stood outside the venue’s gates, in what they insisted I didn’t describe as a protest, but rather as “a welcome to the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom”. I asked why they were there: “We’re hoping that either of them come out and recognise the very important part that Northern Ireland plays in the United Kingdom, and honour our votes over Brexit,” Anne told me. Was she a Conservative member or voter? “Oh no!” she laughed, shaking her head.

The entire Northern Ireland membership of the Conservative Party, around 600 people, could have comfortably seated itself in the function room of the grand Gothic-revival Culloden hotel where the hustings were held. In the event, only 250 tickets were released. The party has no elected representatives in the province: at the last Assembly election, in May, its chairman Matthew Robinson received 254 votes. What the point of all this was, other than a vague gesture of metropolitan support for the Union, was unclear. But for the audience, perhaps that was enough.

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When Liz Truss came on stage, she declared herself a child of the Union, by virtue of having lived in Paisley as a child. When Rishi Sunak followed her, bounding on stage with headboy-ish enthusiasm, his opening words of “Good afternoon, my fellow Britons!”, delivered with assumed Johnsonian bonhomie, drew applause from the crowd and scorn from the assembled lobby hacks.

The speeches were largely boilerplate, delivered with the enthusiastic sincerity of a fading rock band telling the people of a Midwest small-town how much they love the place. Both talked up their love of what Truss called “our fantastic Union”, their desire to “fix” the economy, the NHS, the country as a whole. In a part of the UK where 27.7% of the population are public sector employees, both shied away from the talk of shrinking the state that does so well in their true-blue comfort zones. Much like the personal immigration story with which Sunak opened, Truss’s repeated pledges to cut the taxes on which the province’s economy depends was met with polite silence. Instead, both promised a Freeport for Northern Ireland, each claiming it as their own personal passion project; each also claimed ownership of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which may or may not end the province’s political deadlock if and when it passes through the Lords. Both made a point of emphasising that a woman is in fact a woman, to audience applause.

The questions, as always, were more interesting, not least because journalists weren’t permitted to ask any. Truss was twice asked about the prospects of repealing, or at least amending Northern Ireland’s new law permitting abortion, passed by Westminster in 2019 during the province’s last period of suspended devolution. Would Liz Truss be the “Wilberforce” who would “see infanticide abolished in our province?” She would not: “We need all of our laws to apply across all of the United Kingdom — that’s what being in a union means,” she replied, gaining her the loudest applause of the entire event.

Given that she’d choose Northern Ireland’s next Secretary of State, how would she ensure the role wasn’t given to just another “fly-in, fly-out, absentee political landlord?” She’d select the best person for the job, she replied as if that were the answer. Would she “kowtow to those running us as a colonial outpost, now bossed about by international bodies in Europe and America?” Summoning up her deepest Thatcherian dignity, she promised that she would “be very clear with people like Nancy Pelosi about what we need to do”.

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When it was Sunak’s turn to hold the floor, his Thatcherite credentials came filtered through apostolic succession via Blair and Cameron. Responding to a nurse who complained that the only two emergency psychiatric beds in the province were mattresses on the floor, he replied in the manner of a senior prefect sternly but sadly informing the NHS that it had let the house down. “We have to be bold about the NHS,” he promised, before proposing a vague crackdown on patients missing their appointments.

A more polished performer than Truss — perhaps a little too polished for the audience, judging by the relative levels of applause — he promised he’d be “much tougher” on welfare claimants, to get people off benefits and into work. He doesn’t believe in “Lefty woke culture that seeks to cancel our culture, our values, our women”, he insisted, holding out for the applause that came, after a time. Wielding a smile like a scalpel, he pointed out that Truss’s proposed tax cuts would only save people on average wages £1 a week — and only save someone on her own wages £1,000 a year.

And then it was all over. What had been achieved? It was hard to say. Northern Ireland’s 600 Conservatives were hardly likely to win the battle for either candidate, and nor did either candidate have much beyond vague platitudes to offer Northern Ireland. When one audience member accused Johnson of lying to the Queen and the country, Truss responded with rare passion that he’d been “an excellent Prime Minister”, who’d delivered on Brexit, the vaccine and “standing up to Vladimir Putin” — all three of which will sound like victories from a fabled ancient past if and when the lights go out and the gas runs out this winter. Only Sunak, warning the audience that “the most important question facing our country in the short term is how we’re going to get through this winter”, briefly addressed the looming state capacity crisis that will define the next stage of British politics. If either of them have a concrete set of proposals to manage it, they were not unveiled on stage in Belfast.

Northern Ireland is a country performing far below its full potential, home to a vanished industrial heritage, landscapes of breath-taking beauty and a creative people perennially let down by dysfunctional politics and a political class unworthy of the people it is pledged to serve. In this, Northern Ireland entirely reflects the rest of the country: its most pressing problems, of weak state capacity and crumbling infrastructure, are those of Britain as a whole. Even if the province’s minuscule Conservative party membership was flattered by the hour-long attention of the Westminster class, fresh from a hustings the day before in another semi-detached province of our crumbling state, the candidates’ gaze is already focussed on the next leg of their needlessly drawn-out gladiatorial contest, even as the country falls apart around them. But the circus moves on. Whatever this is about, it isn’t about providing good governance.

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Flying into Belfast, I reread Carl Schmitt’s seminal 1923 essay The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, in which the influential, if controversial, thinker observed that the parliamentary system was intended as “a means for selecting political leaders, a certain way to overcome political dilettantism and to admit the best and most able to political leadership”. But, he noted sadly, “whether parliament actually possesses the capacity to build a political elite has since become very questionable. Today one would certainly not think so optimistically about this selection instrument”. All in all, Schmitt observed, “parliamentarism has already produced a situation in which all public business has become an object of spoils and compromise for the parties and their followers, and politics, far from being the concern of an elite, has become the despised business of a rather dubious class of persons.” It is doubtful that the performance at the Culloden would have changed his mind, or that the rather dubious class of person on stage would have won him over.

To claim that the two duelling candidates represent the “best and most able” of a nation of 70 million people is absurd, but here we are. Like Northern Ireland, the country as a whole lacks a functioning government just when it needs it most. At a moment of historic crisis, the governing party fritters its attention away on a pointless contest to win over 0.03% of the population of a charming but economically and politically marginal province; or rather, to use it as a stage to speak to the lobby through which all power in Britain flows. There must be better ways of choosing a prime minister, or of running a country, than this strange performance. Northern Ireland surely deserves better than this, but so do we all.

Michael Leonard, Joseph’s cousin, was shot dead by Royal Ulster Constabulary police officers on 17 May 1973. The day before we meet, 40 of Michael’s friends and family had gathered at the spot. Flowers were laid. A small cross was erected. There was wistful talk about a criminal investigation.

“That’s it just there,” Joseph says quietly, half-motioning for me to pull over. For the past 30 seconds he has been anxiously clenching and unclenching his fists. “Michael was alone when he died,” Joseph says. “His mother had sent him out from their home in Pettigo to fetch dinner from the shop on the other side of the border.”

Michael’s crime was to drive without a licence. The police later claimed he had refused to stop at a checkpoint that, it later turned out, didn’t exist. And so they pursued him until, 200 metres from the border, an officer leant out of his Land Rover and fired his gun. Michael was 24-years old. He was due to get married that summer. After that: a family and a career as a cattle dealer.

“Michael’s death was a tragedy,” Joseph says. “But it’s just one tragedy in hundreds. There are too many to be forgotten. Everyone here knows someone who was attacked.”

***

Carelessly sitting astride the Termon River, Pettigo remains shy about being the only village on the island of Ireland to be divided between the North and the Republic. There is no painted line on the two bridges that connect Counties Fermanagh and Donegal. There is no gift shop. Just a ramshackle Customs Post, its shamrock paint turned to rust, and a statue dedicated to the memory of the four young men who died “fighting against British forces in 1922”.

“Like rats in a trap!” was the verdict of one British newspaper after the Battle of Pettigo and Belleek. Pettigo had been partitioned for just over a year when the IRA moved in, a hundred years ago this week. The British responded with artillery shells, machine guns, trenches and bayonets; they recaptured Pettigo after 12 days. It was once again split in two, doomed to become a front in Ireland’s internal conflict — and a plaything for politicians who view a “hard border” as an acceptable means to end it. Today, you can buy an envelope with euros in the village shop on the Donegal side, cross the river, and post it with a stamp bought from the Post Office with sterling.

Mervyn Johnston’s garage is perched on the Fermanagh side of the river. It was a theatre for the IRA’s season of bombings in 1972. A former part-time soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment, he was a walking target. Now 83, he knows he’s lucky to have survived. “We had two major bombs and three or four incendiaries,” he tells me. “Oh, and I’ve been shot at.”

Mervyn was sitting on the far side of the workshop when a man came to the door with a box, shouted that it was a bomb and demanded everyone leave. “I was having a cup of tea and thought it was all a joke. But then another chap came in with a gun and took us outside and lined us up against the wall.” The gunman started to ask for names. “Now, I had two lads working for me at the time who were also called Johnston, and I was second in the line and knew that if I gave a wrong name and these lads don’t, one of them is going to get shot.”

So Mervyn told the truth. “The next thing I know there’s a gun pressed to my forehead — a .45 revolver.” When the trigger was about to be pulled, Mervyn quickly ducked; the bullet missed him, ricocheted off the wall and hit one of his apprentices, though not fatally. “Before they could react, I ran off and they fired a few more shots after me. They’re just lucky I didn’t have a weapon on me.”

Did you have one nearby? “Oh yes. I went round and got my SMG [submachine gun] and fired a few rounds at them while they were driving off.” I ask him if, after all the attacks, he still feels the need to look over his shoulder. “The thing is, back then, there was never any problem here with the locals. The attackers came from a long distance away. Even after everything, I would still go across the river to have a drink in the pub.”

***

At Britton’s Bar that evening, Rangers are about to lose the Europa League final on penalties but no one is watching. We are talking about the explosions that pummelled Mervyn’s garage in 1972 when Triona Britton, the landlady, describes how she was almost killed during an attack that July. She disappears upstairs and reemerges clutching newspaper reports from the days after the attack. “Pettigo Baby Narrow Escape,” reads one headline. “I was fast asleep in my cot when the bomb exploded,” she explains. Slabs of concrete and slivers of steel from the car carrying the bomb fizzed through the air. “One piece of shrapnel ripped through the venetian blind and lodged itself in the wall right next to where I was sleeping,” Triona says.

Three men start to discuss their memories of 1972. “It’s a generational thing,” Frank, 39, says. “Speak to the older men and women, and their memories will be of the bombings. But it’s different for those of us who came after. They had the bombs; we didn’t. I was the first generation to be given the chance to go to an integrated school.”

Is this why younger people, more distanced from the horrors of 1972, are less concerned with the current debate over scrapping the Irish Protocol? “Many people here don’t care about the Protocol,” he replies. “There are more important things for them to worry about.”

***

To understand these worries, go to Belleek. A 20-minute drive away from Pettigo, the border village prides itself on the ceramics produced by its pottery: you can buy a hand-crafted ice bucket for £4,200. Seven weeks ago, a food bank opened.

“We were asked to come by the district council,” its organiser, John, tells me. “Things have definitely got worse in the past few months. The price of everything has gone up. The only thing that comes down is the rain.”

Northern Ireland, like the rest of the UK, is staggering through a cost-of-living crisis. But while Westminster, Holyrood, and the Senedd make a pretence of trying to fix theirs, Stormont remains silent. It’s been over a fortnight since Sinn Fein took control of the Northern Ireland Assembly. But what do they have to show for it? A handful of photos from victory night; a few half-hearted appeals for a border poll. And that’s it. Northern Ireland’s latest political revolution hasn’t even made it out of its wrapping paper.

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With the DUP refusing to elect a Speaker to the national assembly until the Protocol is scrapped, the region faces months — perhaps even years — without a functioning executive. Until that changes, close to £500 million that could be spent on easing the ongoing crisis cannot be touched. In a county such as Fermanagh where the average wage is £23,000 — 12% lower than the average for Northern Ireland — that absence stings. This time last year, a quarter of children here were living in poverty. Nobody doubts that figure has increased.

“You look at our politicians and feel despair,” John says. “Hardworking people are being forced to go hungry, while their politicians don’t turn up to work and still take home their wage.” He tells me to head to Newtownbutler to see local poverty at its worst. “Since the start of April, we’ve had 18 different families start using the food bank there. And that number is only going to go up…”

***

On 19 August 2019, the Troubles returned to Newtownbutler. Police and soldiers patrolled the fields surrounding the village; surveillance aircraft hovered in the grey sky. A local newspaper had been tipped-off about a bomb being planted. The device was found and turned out to be a hoax, but a second explosive was hidden nearby. When it detonated, nobody was injured. Politicians in both Sinn Fein and the DUP condemned the attack. Then they looked away.

The Lanesbourough Arms Hotel, with its two-story bar, guards the crossroads at the centre of Newtownbutler. It opened in 1820 but now, like almost half the buildings slumped on either side, it is decomposing. Its windows have been smashed in; paint flakes off the walls. Peer through the broken glass and plates are still stacked neatly in the kitchen; an old telephone gathers dust on a shelf; a plastic Christmas tree is garlanded with baubles and dust. Nobody has pulled a pint there since 2004.

Maureen Murray shuffles past the Lanesborough whenever she can afford to buy food. “Everything is getting more expensive by the minute,” she says. “But what can we do? We’re all living on the breadline now. Everybody here worries about whether they’ll have enough food on the table next week.” Then she points to her walking stick: “I’m a bomb victim. I’ve always had to struggle.”

It was an October evening in 1972 when the car containing three men drove slowly into Annaghmore, on the border between Fermanagh and Monaghan. Maureen, then 21, looked on with her two siblings as one of the occupants threw a device through the village shop’s window. Unaware it was a bomb, Maureen and Raymond ran towards the building to make sure its owner hadn’t been injured. When the device exploded, Maureen was thrown into the air. Blinded in one eye and with a shattered leg, she has been unable to walk without a stick since. “My brother died by my feet,” she says. He was 24, the same age as Michael Leonard.

“I’m supposed to be receiving some extra money because I’m a bomb victim, but that doesn’t look like happening.” She explains how everything’s been held up by Stormont. “People are talking about that Protocol, but why does that matter if we’re struggling to feed ourselves? Everyone round here uses the food bank. It has become a fact of life.”

Around the corner, Elizabeth and Vincent have picked up their two-year-old daughter. She sleeps in her pram, oblivious to her parents’ anxiety. It is Thursday, and they are dreading the weekend: “By the time it comes, we often have nothing,” says Elizabeth. “It’s normal for us to have a fiver or tenner to spend between us and the three kids [aged between two and seven]. The foodbank is really helpful, but it doesn’t solve everything. When our kids ask for more food, we have to tell them to leave some for tomorrow or the next day.”

Vincent reels off the realities of inflation. “The prices of milk, nappies and wipes have gone up by 10p in no time,” he says. “Then there’s the price of fuel: it’s £1.79 for diesel over here. We can’t even afford to drive to the supermarket anymore.” Elizabeth stops rolling her pram back and forth. “The food, the petrol… Fucking everything is going up.”

And what if that doesn’t change? Silence. “I don’t want to think about it,” Elizabeth eventually says. “We’re just about keeping our heads above the water as it is.” Vincent grimaces. “Our politicians are doing fuck all at the moment to help us.”

In a region without a functioning government, where every politician seems to care more about a Protocol passed by accident than whether a family can feed itself, it’s hard not to conclude the same. In England, the politicians are useless. In Brussels, they’re intransigent. In Stormont, they don’t exist.

But this isn’t a story about the Protocol, or Brexit, or the prospect of a united Ireland. It is a story about politics — and what happens when it’s turned into a vacuum; when indifference becomes institutionalised and ordinary people are left to pick up the pieces. During the height of the Troubles, the authorities betrayed you by shooting you in the back as you drove down a country lane. Today, they just let you starve.

Books of condolence were opened in numerous cities. Politicians from all sides voiced their deep regret. It moved the world, to see this representative of an apparently post-Troubles Northern Ireland — a young, gay, working-class Catholic woman with many Protestant friends — cut down by something that had darted out of the shadows to re-assert what many outsiders assumed had disappeared from the political scene: the fanatical pursuit of a united Ireland by means of violence.

Lyra herself hadn’t been much of a cheerleader for either side of the border argument: she wrote in 2014, “I don’t want a united Ireland or a stronger Union. I just want a better life.” By 2019, in personal terms, life had indeed got much better since the days when she was a lonely, unhappy teenager, bullied for her emergent sexuality. She had a partner, a successful career as a journalist, and a two-book deal with Faber. Politically, however, Northern Ireland was in much worse shape than many might have hoped when the Belfast Agreement was signed in 1998 — something Lyra was acutely aware of. Her articles circled the dark psychological legacy of the Troubles, including the high suicide rate among the generation who grew up after the Agreement, many of them trapped in pockets of deprivation and neglect where violence still held sway.

In her last essay, published posthumously in the Guardian, Lyra skewered the bargain made for her generation, or at least how it had played out: “We were to reap the spoils and prosperity that supposedly came with peace. In the end, we did get the peace — or something close to it — and those who’d caused carnage in the decades before got the money. Whether they’d abandoned arms (as the Provisionals did) or retained them (like the Loyalists), they’d managed to make a ton of paper. We got to live with the outcome of their choices.”

The politicians had made three promises to sell the peace deal to the Northern Ireland electorate, she said. The first, peace itself, they “barely delivered on”: paramilitaries may have stopped murdering “the other side”, but they quickly began “terrorising their own” with renewed vigour in working-class communities, something that barely excited attention outside of Northern Ireland. The second promise was prosperity in a thriving new peacetime economy, one which failed to materialise for most younger people. The third failed pledge, she said, “was the one that hurt the most”, and was felt mostly in the areas where “the gunmen continued to roam”. The politicians had promised that “the days of young people disappearing and dying young were gone”. As everyone knows — not least Lyra’s own family — they weren’t.

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Three years on, Lyra McKee’s analysis of the way in which her generation had been let down remains, sadly, accurate. Northern Ireland required a unified, determined and highly thoughtful approach to rebuilding a civil society: it never got one. The British government bolted unionists and nationalists together in the oddly-constructed power-sharing Stormont administration, and then retreated with great relief, intervening like a distracted parent only at moments of crisis and collapse.

The concessions granted to paramilitary organisations in order to broker the Agreement — such as the release of republican and loyalist prisoners from jail — were not seen as one-off gestures, after which authority would clamp down hard on paramilitary activity and its routine glorifications of a murderous culture. Instead these concessions became a template for a new, politically tentative approach to paramilitarism, which has uneasily endured for almost 25 years.

Its central tenet appeared to be that so long as the loyalist and republican paramilitaries avoided explicit acts of sectarian violence, and refrained from bombings and shootings outside Northern Ireland, they should not be overly antagonised at home: their working-class fiefdoms would effectively remain their own, “policed” by bullets and brutal beatings doled out to troublesome youths, or those who simply defied bullying.

A series of post-Agreement IRA murders of young Catholic men, from Andrew Kearney in 1998 to Paul Quinn in 2007, were politically overlooked. Sinn Fein politicians frequently commemorate what Deputy First Minister Michelle O’Neill calls “our freedom struggle” in terms which gloss over the squalid reality of IRA killings. Flags of the Ulster Volunteer Force — responsible for some of the most grotesque sectarian murders of the Troubles — have been put up sporadically in mixed Belfast housing estates, no doubt intended to intimidate Catholic residents. Despite the valiant efforts of many small-scale community projects aimed at building reconciliation, the self-laudatory nature of former and current paramilitary organisations has persistently worked against building an idea of Northern Ireland as a “shared” place.

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Loyalist paramilitaries, the UDA and the UVF, are meanwhile securing their finances by means of extortion, intimidation and the drugs trade. And republican “dissident” groups such as the New IRA and the Continuity IRA are embroiled in criminal activity while also pledging to continue with their violent campaign for a united Ireland. It doesn’t seem as if the PSNI’s Northern Ireland Paramilitary Crime Task Force, set up in 2017, is going to be retired any time soon.

If the current paramilitary scene is a volatile mix, with a fair amount of money and arms sloshing around in it, the bad news is that the wider politics is far from steady either. Indeed, the strongest feature of Northern Irish politics since 1998 has been the steady erosion of its middle ground, with the more centrist unionist UUP and nationalist SDLP losing out to the DUP and Sinn Fein respectively. Sinn Fein, which includes many prominent former IRA members, is currently on course to be Northern Ireland’s largest party after the May 5 elections — as well as Ireland’s richest, its slick electoral machine oiled by nearly £4 million left to it in the will of an eccentric Englishman, William Hampton.

Ulster unionism has perhaps never, in living memory, felt itself so precarious. A long spell of devolution has eroded bonds with the — nominally — Conservative and Unionist party, leaving unionists with few other political allies in the UK. Nor have DUP politicians served their own cause well: narrowly focused on small gains, their reputation as canny political horse-traders has too often been undermined by an acceptance of limping nags tricked up for market-day. The most notable was an early acquiescence — later rescinded — to Boris Johnson’s Brexit plan involving a degree of “regulatory divergence” for Northern Ireland, sold by their Prime Minister with fervent assurances that a customs border in the Irish Sea would happen only “over my dead body”.

The customs sea border is now long established, under the Northern Ireland protocol, and Johnson is very much alive. Perhaps no other British Prime Minister would have been so reckless as to amputate one part of the UK from the rest and believe that the consequences would be negligible, but the deed has been done.

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For the moment the political pain is largely experienced by unionism, and it is growing more intense, as are the arguments between the unionist parties over how best to oppose the sea border. There have been attempts to overturn the Protocol in the courts, but the most recent judgement by the Court of Appeal was that it “lawfully modified” the 1800 Acts of Union and could stand. A series of local rallies have been held to emphasise public anger against the legislation, but they have drawn little attention from London. Westminster had been sabre-rattling towards the EU about triggering Article 16 to suspend Northern Ireland customs checks — but with the British government preoccupied by Ukraine and its own rolling scandals, this rhetoric has grown notably quieter.

The loyalist paramilitaries — who, like their republican counterparts, view violence as the ultimate means of political conversation — are growing restless. Earlier Brexit proposals, involving some form of “frictionless” land customs border with the Republic of Ireland, were later shelved in no small part because the then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar energetically emphasised the risk of a return to republican violence if a customs border were put in place. The loyalists are now clearly beginning to wonder if their violence is deemed to be of inferior quality, and pondering how they might put that right.

In a grim echo of the IRA’s campaign in England during the Troubles, they have begun to speak of threatening politicians and targets in the Republic of Ireland. To emphasise the point, the UVF recently put on a disturbing theatrical display during a visit of the Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney to Belfast, by hijacking a van and using it to transport a hoax bomb to the event he was attending.

The wider unionist population has little time for such threats and theatrics, but it is nonetheless politically worried. A Sinn Fein First Minister in Stormont would be a symbolic defeat for unionism, especially when allied to the possibility of the party entering government in Dublin in 2025. The vision of an Ireland presided over by Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald — who has described the IRA campaign as “justified” — with the elder statesman Gerry Adams celebrating in the background, is one which horrifies even the most moderate of unionists.

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It is far from a done deal, since older voters in Ireland remain wary, having a keener memory of IRA atrocities, and many in the other Irish parties are acutely conscious of the possible harm which a Sinn Fein government could do to a broadly successful state: in recent polls, Republican parties Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael regained a measure of electoral ground. Still, Sinn Fein success remains a distinct possibility: younger voters may be swayed by promises on health and housing, and the party’s bogus but strategic rewriting of the Provisional IRA campaign as necessary for “civil rights”.

The landscape in Ireland, North and South, is not what one would have hoped for in 1998, or even at the time of Lyra McKee’s death in 2019: an increasingly unmoored, isolated unionism, twitchy loyalist paramilitaries, a triumphalist Irish republicanism, and a democratic Irish electorate potentially sleepwalking towards installing a government organically linked to a long and bloody sectarian campaign.

And yet, in the thick of it all, the border is not the burning question for ordinary people in Northern Ireland that many might imagine: a recent poll found that only 30% would back the reunification of Ireland if a border poll were held tomorrow, with 45.3% voting against it. When they are asked what they want, Northern Ireland itself is a more settled entity than it often appears. Like any other voters, they are currently more preoccupied with the health service and the cost-of-living crisis; like Lyra, they “just want a better life”.

But Northern Ireland’s intensifying political situation now merits urgent attention from any British or Irish politicians who can co-operate to defuse it: chaos in Northern Ireland, after all, has almost never taken account of what ordinary people want.

You can’t help but love the way an old-timer in a white aran sweater and houndstooth flat cap tells it. You want to believe in the solidarity of the diaspora. But if what he says is true, the Irish would not have just won their independence; we’d control India, Australia, and, God forbid, Canada.

Instead, what we got was the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, signed 100 years ago this week. The treaty promised Ireland self-government under British dominion, as well as an exit plan for the Ulsterman in the counties to the north. With peace restored after centuries of violence, the Irish, naturally, decided to have another war. The victorious rebels now found themselves fighting the IRA and Éamon de Valera, who rejected the treaty as being too favourable to the British.

The provisional government, led by Michael Collins and the subsequent Irish Free State, turned their attention to an important front in the civil war: the United States. The Government lacked diplomatic recognition under the terms of the treaty, but its mission was not to wrangle support in Washington, DC; it was to convince the Irish Americans who had financed and armed Irish revolutionary forces to rally behind the treaty.

Two years earlier, the American-born de Valera had arrived in the United States as a stowaway on the SS Lapland, having just escaped from prison in England. Once ashore, the self-proclaimed president of the Irish Republic raised the equivalent of $70 million for the revolution in a coast-to-coast barnstorming tour, which drew disapproval from American elites. The grandees of Washington may have thought it uncouth to welcome a phantom dignitary from a non-existent country, but local and state politicians knew they would be whipped from office if they ignored the visit.

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Babe Ruth’s Boston Red Sox drew 15,000 fans to its 1918 World Series victory, the club’s last championship for nearly a century. Nine months later, 50,000 people packed the same stadium to witness de Valera speak, flanked on the podium by former Mayor James Michael Curley and every member of the city’s Democratic machine. The rapture from the crowd prompted invitations from the governors of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, as well as city leaders in Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Ultimately, De Valera’s year-long jaunt across the United States helped the Irish win their independence — and once the civil war started, leaders of the provisional government feared his contacts could be mobilised against the treaty. What they did not appreciate was how polarising a figure de Valera had become among the Irish diaspora.

Irish American leaders bristled at de Valera’s imperial attitude; he was happy to cash the checks and happier still to dismiss his financial backers when they opined on how to spend the money. The Gaelic American, the mouthpiece for the republican movement in the United States, opposed the treaty right up until the moment de Valera agreed with it. “This half-breed Spanish-American Jew intends if he can to turn Ireland into a miniature Mexico where defeated candidates for office refused to abide by the decision of the majority rendered at the election and seek to overthrow the will of the people by force,” the paper said in an editorial.

While some Irish American activists continued to oppose the treaty, Free State officials determined the silent majority of the Irish in America were satisfied to hear that their countrymen had received a reprieve from British oppression. The details of whatever government emerged were of little concern. “The most effective propaganda is frequent dignified statements from the government of the Irish Free State showing that it is functioning successfully and is determined to do so,” diplomat Timothy Smiddy wrote in a memo back home.

Smiddy shifted the focus of the pro-treaty forces from winning the hearts and minds of Irish American activists to publicly re-enforcing the legitimacy of the new government. He set about attempting to undo the very work in America that had helped the Irish win independence, pressing US officials who had once turned a blind eye to gun-running to crack down on it. He prevailed upon activists to ignore the pleas of IRA widows when the hat made its way around the pub. He succeeded on all fronts, but nothing helped his cause more than the American Irish’s unity in their own domestic political machines where ethnic solidarity trumped ideological difference.

As for De Valera, he was soon chastened by the civil war that followed the Anglo-Irish treaty. He appeared to have learned a few important lessons from the machine politicians that kissed his ring back in 1919. James Michael Curley, like the Irish rebel leader, did two prison stints for fraud. This did not stop the Boston Irish from sending him to Congress, the governor’s mansion, and on four occasions to the Mayor’s Office. When he was barred from attending the 1932 Democratic convention with the Massachusetts state delegation, he arrived in Chicago alone. The party clerk must have been puzzled during roll call when the Puerto Rican delegation sent forth its new ‘representative’: Alcalde Jaime Miguel Culeo. The people of Boston could forgive any crime or public embarrassment, so long as Curley delivered on the patronage projects that won him the nickname the “Mayor of the Poor”.

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By 1926, de Valera cut ties with Sinn Féin and established Fianna Fáil, pledging to take his seat in the Dáil and achieve republican government from within the Irish Free State. In 1932, Fianna Fáil dominated the elections on a populist platform dedicated to public works projects and social security. He delivered on the social safety net, which kept Fianna Fáil in charge long enough to gut the constitution of any trace of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. By July 1937, just two months after someone dynamited George II’s imperial monument in St. Stephen’s Green, the Irish had a new constitution. That “half-breed Spanish Jew” had made good on delivering an authentic and unique Irish Catholic vision for what a Republic could be.

The Sons of Gael who threw their fivers into the hat and their .38s into the barrel throughout the Troubles believed their contributions would deliver de Valera’s romantic vision to their compatriots to the north. Today, you’ll find their American grandchildren on barstools listening in awe to the Old Timer in the Aran Sweater and singing along to “A Nation Once Again”, as indifferent to the particulars on the ground in the old country as their great grandfathers were at the time of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

These youths have embraced smoking and the Clancy Brothers and unapologetic popery to stick it to the secular, technocratic, iconoclastic, opioid-addicted world the dominant protestant class left the United States. Éire is a counter-culture preserved in amber, an escape hatch from a modernity that has left them feeling just as alien as their great grandparents must have felt at Ellis Island.

They have no idea the freedom fighters of the IRA are mere heroin dealers now. That the Emerald Isle has become Europe’s answer to the Cayman Islands, rather than that beacon standing athwart brute materialism. Ireland, freed from the oppression of the Black and Tans, voluntarily followed London’s lead into financialisation and speculation.

It is a nation of bankers and those on the dole, waking up to the realisation that Silicon Valley’s dream of universal basic income exists so the jobless masses can have just enough money in their pockets to pay the billionaire overlord class. The robots aren’t advanced enough to take all the jobs just yet, so they make do with Polish labourers — the only people in Ireland who still go to Mass in the modernist concrete churches.

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To look at Ireland from abroad is to understand the world of John Swanwick Drennan, the least appreciated of the great Irish poets:

A golden casket I designed
To hold a braid of hair
My Love was false and now I find
A coil of serpents there

The Irish resent the pedestal erected by the diaspora. They desire the same freedom to squander the national inheritance as the rest of the West. Occasionally, Irish Americans — or at least a sliver of its activist class — take notice of the retreat from what made Ireland unique only to be dismissed as Cromwellian interlopers.

When Ireland’s technocratic banker class moved to strike the constitutional protection of the unborn, Americans rallied to its defence (the pro-life movement being one of the last vestiges of Irish Catholic machine politics). Irish authorities, hungry as they are for US investment when it comes to corporate tax dodges, suddenly developed an allergy to American dollars. Just as the Irish Free State appealed to higher authorities in DC to stifle the flow of guns, the ruling class turned to Dublin corporate resident Mark Zuckerberg to successfully disarm the opposition.

One hundred years on, de Valera is as welcome in Ireland today as Curley was at the 1932 Democratic convention.

One boy said that it might be a good idea not to go into town for a while, by which he meant Belfast city centre. It sounded to me like something he had heard his parents say. When news came of Sands’s death, riots broke out across Northern Ireland. A milk lorry was stoned in the Catholic New Lodge area, and an incoming brick hit its milkman Eric Guiney, 45, on the head. He fell unconscious and the lorry crashed. His 14-year-old son Desmond, who was riding alongside him, died first. Desmond was mad about horses, his mother said, and had wanted to be a jockey: two children on horseback led his funeral cortege. Eric, who had remained in a coma, died the day after his son’s funeral.

Another three hunger-strikers died within a fortnight of Sands. The stand-off between the Irish republican hunger-strikers and Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, had become an elemental contest of wills. The IRA men in the H-blocks of the Maze prison were demanding the status of political prisoners. They had “five demands”: lost remission restored, the right to free association, better privileges on recreation and visiting, to wear their own clothes and to decline prison work. Mrs Thatcher was equally adamant that the British government would continue to regard convicted IRA members as criminals. On the face of it, all the players were immovable.

Things had taken years to reach this feverish pitch. “Special category status”, which effectively treated IRA prisoners as prisoners of war, had first been introduced in July 1972, following a shorter-lived IRA hunger strike. That status came to an end in March 1976, when Harold Wilson’s government decided to treat convicted IRA members like any other criminal in prison. IRA leaders within prison were infuriated that their command structure in the blocks had been disrupted, and the “screws” placed back in charge. They duly sent word to the organisation outside to step up the assassinations of prison officers.

The first prison officer killed by the IRA, in April that same year, was Pacelli Dillon, a married Catholic father of five children, one of whom had been blind and disabled from birth. He was shot outside his house as he got into his car, on his way to finalise the purchase of a new family home. Between the start of the criminalisation policy and the end of the hunger strikes, a total of 18  prison officers were murdered, including the deputy governor of the Maze Prison, Albert Miles. It did not improve ongoing relations between inmates and prison staff, who — despite being paid extra to work on the H-blocks — were operating under skyrocketing levels of stress.

Nor did the “blanket protest” which began in September 1976. IRA prisoners refused to put on prison uniform. Denied the right to wear their own clothes, they vowed to wear no clothes at all, but instead wrapped themselves in the blankets on their beds. When that made little headway, they escalated it in 1978 to the “dirty protest”. Instead of “slopping out” the chamber-pots in their cells each morning, they daubed the walls and ceilings with faeces and poured the urine on the floor. Conditions in the cells became unimaginable. Images began to circulate of long-haired, bearded IRA prisoners, wrapped in blankets, staring out from the swirling chiaroscuro of brown walls. Prisoners complained of random beatings and invasive strip searches from the prison officers; officers spoke of death threats to them and their families. Northern Ireland was an intimate society, where people watched each other closely. “I hear your daughter’s just started school,” might pass for polite chit-chat in other places. In the Maze, it could make a prison officer’s blood run cold.

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Meanwhile, two opposing interpretations of the conditions began to emerge, involving Irish emotion and English logic. Cardinal O’Fiaich, then the Roman Catholic Primate of All-Ireland, visited the H-blocks 3,4 and 5 in 1978. He spoke passionately afterwards of his revulsion at the “stench and filth in some of the cells” and the “inhuman conditions” in which “over 300 prisoners are incarcerated”. These were conditions, he said, in which one would not keep an animal. The Northern Ireland Office responded coolly, “These criminals are totally responsible for the situation in which they find themselves. It is they who have been smearing excreta on the walls and pouring urine through the cell doors.”

Still, the issue failed to stir any great sympathy in the broader nationalist electorate. And nor did the prisoners seem any closer to achieving their goal. Then, in October 1980, came the first hunger strike.

It was led by Brendan Hughes, a well-known IRA man who had been the main organiser of Bloody Friday, the day in July 1972 on which the IRA had set off 22 bombs across Belfast, killing nine people and injuring 130. Hughes, a veteran of the blanket protest, was the IRA commander in the prison.

This hunger strike started with seven republican prisoners, including Hughes, but a much larger number joined it as it went on. It was called off after 53 days. Hughes’ fellow hunger-striker and friend Sean McKenna was at death’s door, and it seemed that the British had privately offered significant concessions. Later, upon closer examination of the offer, the IRA inmates decided that they hadn’t. The consensus among the British, wrongly, was that the IRA men were not prepared to take the hunger strike all the way.

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The prisoners often spoke Irish to each other in a bid to elude the understanding of the prison officers. Bobby Sands — who had taken over as commander while Hughes was fasting — reportedly told his fellow-prisoners “Fuair muid faic.” (“We got nothing”).

Sands, 27, had come of age amid the intensifying sectarianism of the late 1960s and early 70s, when both Catholic and Protestant families were driven out of estates dominated by those of the other religion. His own family had been compelled by loyalist thugs to leave Rathcoole, a predominantly Protestant housing estate. He himself, he said later, had been threatened out of his job at an apprentice coach-builder by members of a loyalist “tartan gang”. Aged 18, he joined the IRA. Sands had a wife, Geraldine, and son, born in 1973, but his growing involvement with the IRA had put a strain on the marriage, and his wife had taken the child to live in England. Now he was willing to devote everything to the cause.

When it came to organising a new hunger strike, Sands thought he could do better tactically: this time with a staggered strike which would prolong and intensify the pressure upon the British. A true believer in the republican “armed revolution” he kept a diary for the first 17 days of his fast: it details his concern at what he is putting his family through, pleasure at the messages of support he is getting from people outside, and his loathing of the “petty vindictiveness” of the prison authorities. Sands liked ornithology and poetry: he writes of birds he can hear, such as a passing curlew, and admires some of Kipling’s verses in a book he has got from the library. The tone is high-flown, single-minded, ascetic and, to a degree, romantic. It’s sad to read.

That same month Frank Maguire, an Independent Republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, died of a heart attack. It was decided to run Sands as an “Anti H-Block” republican candidate against the other contender for the seat, the Ulster Unionist Harry West.

The moderate nationalist party, The Social Democratic and Labour Party, had already selected their candidate, Austin Currie, but it was eventually decided not to field him, and to give Sands a free run at the seat. The vote on 9 April would shape the direction of Northern Ireland up until the present day: Sands was returned as the MP. Less than a month later he was dead.

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Pity the prisoners who remain locked up

By Carlo Gébler

In order to try to understand the hunger strikes, and the radically different set of reactions to them then and now, it is necessary to keep in mind a number of seemingly contradictory pictures at once.

One picture is of the IRA activity ongoing outside the Maze prison at the time: a brutal, bloody campaign conducted without scruple for human suffering. Two days before Sands won the election, for example, the IRA shot dead a young Protestant woman called Joanne Mathers, a 29-year-old mother of a toddler who was working in Londonderry as a census-taker, an activity of which the IRA disapproved. Throughout the 1980s, the IRA continued to murder police officers, soldiers, alleged informers, civilians and those it later called “mistakes” by means of shooting, landmines, mortar bombs or car bombs.

Another picture is of the scene inside the prison, where a series of otherwise healthy young men were wilfully starving themselves to death, on a point of principle which to them had overtaken the importance of family or future. There was, however, a genuine sense of shared purpose and comradeship among the IRA men in the Maze. The images of them that reached the outside world — wild-haired, gaunt-faced — looked almost biblical. By willingly embracing a lingering death on behalf of Irish Republicanism, they were tapping into the potency of religious martyrdom. The emotions generated by the history and iconography of the Church had now been repurposed for a modern armed campaign.

Something else was going on, too. The argument had dredged up and crystallised ancient enmities. On one hand were Sands and his fellow hunger-strikers, long-haired and bearded Irishmen with defiantly naked torsos; on the other, Margaret Thatcher, an Englishwoman armoured in an immaculate suit, with a golden, coiffed bouffant. They were locked in intransigence, drawing strength from conflicting notions of authority. It echoed an argument that went all the way back to the 16th century, when Elizabeth I, another unbending Englishwoman, sought to impose her government’s rule on mutinous Gaelic chiefs. One of her colonial administrators in Ireland, the poet Edmund Spenser — an enthusiast for the brutal repression of native Irish rebellions — nonetheless spoke of Irish soldiers or “kern” as “great endurers of cold, labour, hunger and all hardness” and “very great scorners of death”. The IRA hunger-strikers were ready to show Thatcher that they, too, were “scorners of death”, determined, if necessary, to carry their resistance to English rule beyond the grave.

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In Northern Ireland itself, Protestant unionists were both unsettled by the hunger strikers and broadly unsympathetic to their aims (IRA demands were shared by loyalist paramilitary prisoners, who had briefly joined the blanket protest). The hunger-strikers were proud members of an organisation linked to appalling acts of violence, and had often arranged such acts themselves. Unionists saw in this new prison strategy a risk that the IRA — who they experienced as aggressors — would be seen internationally as victims. They well understood how hunger could fuse to myth, however, since Protestants had their own foundational story of stubbornness and starvation: the 1689 Siege of Derry, when Protestants locked the city gates against Catholic Jacobite forces. By the end of the siege half of those inside, around 4,000 people, had died either of starvation or injury. Those who survived had done so by eating rats, cats and tallow.

The effect of the hunger strikes on the psyche of many Catholic nationalists, in contrast, was striking and profound. Many of those who had strongly condemned the IRA’s activities — and would continue to do so — were nonetheless deeply moved by what they saw unfolding in the Maze. It was not simply the imagery of the wasting men that affected them, evocative of martyrdom as it was. It was something particular about the clutch of men’s unyielding opposition to the heavy machinery of British government and bureaucracy. The British were getting tugged into the same misunderstanding of Irish psychology that had led them to execute the rebels of the 1916 Easter Rising in cold blood, and thereby turn popular opinion against the British themselves.

The charge was that Thatcher was “letting the hunger strikers die”, but within that lay existing questions of nationhood and authority. In 1940, the Taoiseach Eamon de Valera had himself let two old IRA men die in Mountjoy Prison while on hunger strike for political status, which he consistently refused to grant. His decision had failed to kindle public outrage; he was after all an Irishman and former IRA man himself, in dispute with his own people. Mrs Thatcher was not, and resentment against her perceived hard-heartedness steadily intensified. In Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Sands won the seat with over 30,000 republican and nationalist votes.

Not long afterwards, the IRA leadership realised that the powerful popular emotions kindled by Sands’s suffering and death had opened the way to a new tactic, which was to accrue electoral gains in the nationalist community at the same time as carrying on with paramilitary violence. To wring the maximum success from this strategy, at a time while the whole world was watching, it was necessary to sustain the grim momentum created by the hunger strikes.

Those inside the H-blocks, and the families of the dying men, didn’t always agree. Even as a child, with only a hazy understanding of events, I found myself looking at pictures of those gaunt men with burning eyes. It was a terrible way to die. I remember thinking how difficult it might be to abandon such a course of action, even if you wanted to, when everyone else now clearly expected you to carry on to the death.

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Northern Ireland has little hope left

By Carlo Gébler

In 2005, a former IRA prisoner called Richard O’Rawe published a book called Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-block Hunger Strike. O’Rawe had acted as a public relations officer for the hunger strikers while in prison for armed robbery. He now disclosed that the British government offered a deal in July 1981 which fulfilled most of the prisoners’ demands. By then four hunger strikers had died, he said, and the prison leadership was willing to accept the British offer. But the IRA army council outside the jail — represented by Gerry Adams — prevented it from doing so. Owen Carron, Sands’s election agent, was standing as a republican in the now-vacant seat. One explanation for the IRA’s decision, O’Rawe suggested, was that the six IRA and INLA men who died after the prospective deal was rejected were used as “cannon fodder” to boost Carron’s election campaign, “thus kickstarting the shift away from armed struggle into constitutional politics”.

When O’Rawe’s book came out, its assertions were regarded as a form of heresy in Sinn Fein circles, and it was bitterly denounced and denied by senior party figures, as well as the IRA commanding officer in the Maze at the time. O’Rawe stood his ground, however, and two other Maze prisoners — including a former cellmate — later backed up his story.

Whatever the IRA leadership’s intention, the tenth and last hunger-striker to die, the INLA man Michael Devine, did so early in the morning of August 20th. Not long before, Devine’s son, aged three, had sat by the bed asking his father to give up the hunger strike: “Please Daddy, don’t die!”. But there was no way back. Later that same day Owen Carron was elected MP in Bobby Sands’ place by an even larger majority than his predecessor, with over 31,000 votes.

After Devine’s death, new prisoners were still joining the hunger strikes. But they were increasingly coming up against a force equal in obstinacy to either the young republican prisoners or Margaret Thatcher: that of mothers, in conjunction with a redoubtable Catholic priest, Father Denis Faul, who successfully urged the families of hunger-strikers to intervene medically to stop their loved ones from dying. The unity was disintegrating. On 3 October, the hunger strike was officially called off. The following month, Sinn Fein unveiled its new strategy: to take local government seats in Northern Ireland, “with a ballot box in one hand and an Armalite in the other.”

The republican and loyalist paramilitary violence would grind on for another 13 years, until the ceasefires of 1994, and sporadically thereafter. But looking back, the course of Ireland today was indeed set by the feverish events of 1981. The differing responses of many Northern Protestants and Catholics to the hunger-strikes created a fresh gulf of understanding between them, to add to those that already existed. Sinn Fein has continued to surge electorally, to the point where — at the last Irish general election — it had the largest share of the popular vote. The moderate nationalist SDLP vote has correspondingly declined.

Bobby Sands has become a treasured icon for today’s Sinn Fein, a touchstone of republican purity, and a form of secular saint. But since the 1998 Belfast Agreement members of the Sands family, in particular his younger sister Bernadette, have shunned Sinn Fein and rejected its participation in a political settlement which falls short of a united Ireland. It was a sellout, Bernadette Sands said, deploying the memorable phrase: “Bobby did not die for cross-border bodies with executive powers.” She married Michael McKevitt, a former IRA quarter-master who went on to found the dissident Real IRA and died in January this year.

“The Armalite and the ballot box” strategy has split, leaving Sinn Fein with a bursting ballot box, and the dissidents holding the Armalite. Would Bobby Sands have agreed with his younger sister? He certainly loved her, but we’ll never know. The world was extremely interested in him: when he died cities, including Paris and Tehran, named streets in his honour. Irish bars in New York were closed for two hours in mourning, and Milanese students burned the Union flag. And the curious world keeps returning to his story, in films such as Terry George’s Some Mother’s Son, Steve McQueen’s Hunger, and the more recent documentary 66 Days. There is something that fascinates it about this young man who chose to die rather than back down. Abroad, his image has often served to obscure the squalid brutality of the IRA’s long campaign.

Still, when you’re from a place, you so often remember the people who didn’t choose to die, even more than the ones that did. And when I recall that particular, febrile time just before I went to secondary school, those death-laden months that belonged to the hunger strikers, I can never stop my thoughts from also turning to the milkman and his son.

The bandsmen and the Boyne — and this illogicality — ended up opening the book I was travelling to Northern Ireland to write. The Glass Curtain is about the Troubles. Not the Troubles of Belfast or Derry, but the Troubles of Fermanagh, a rectangular county with a national border on three sides, where the IRA and the British State were at war. We call it the Troubles but trust me, it was a nasty, dirty, vicious civil war.

But I was travelling to Ulster at the fin de siècle, the end of history. When our temporary home there became permanent, I believed the Gods were smiling on us, because I could see, with my own eyes, the place changing for the better. First the Single Market came. (The EU did nothing but good for Northern Ireland, which opted to Remain in 2016.) Then the Good Friday Agreement was negotiated. It was a fudge, but in Ulster we were disgusted and ashamed by all that had happened and all we had done; only the GFA would bring the prisoners home, and only their homecoming would end the war. Then, at last, the Police Service of Northern Ireland replaced the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a source of Republican rage for generations. Eventually, Sinn Féin supported the police.

With this drawn-out, painful process came the feeling that finally, finally the Irish question had been solved — and it had been solved because we’d plumped for the evolutionary rather than the revolutionary solution. Yes, the status quo would be maintained and Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom, but at the same time it would mutate into something else, a Hiberno-British hybrid that everyone knew was really Irish, really part of Ireland, but which had Royal Mail post boxes lying around. Partition would remain but it wouldn’t matter anymore. It only mattered that jaw-jaw had prevailed over war-war — and therefore everything was going to be grand.

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The day before St Patrick’s Day, last year, I left Dublin, where I work, and went home to Fermanagh. I stayed there, in lockdown, until St George’s Day this year, when I set off for Belfast. There had been several nights of rioting there, protests against Westminster’s Northern Ireland Protocol — which established the so-called Irish trade border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, following the UK’s departure from the EU. Loyalist fury was expressed with messages painted on walls and gable ends, on placards and posters. They were everywhere — on bridges, railings and lampposts. Some were complicated, like the politics: a lot of writing superimposed on a Union Flag; others were simple: “We’re British, NOT Irish.”

What the placards told me — what they’d tell anyone who bothered to pay attention — is that Loyalists and Unionists believe the Protocol is going to lever them out of the country in which they were born and shuffle them into a country where they do not want to live; it will transform them from being British subjects to being Irish citizens. “There cannot be a border down the Irish Sea,” said Arlene Foster in October 2018. “A differential between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK — the red line is blood red.”

“What did you expect?” I want to shout. “The Tories were always going to shaft you.” The Loyalists and Unionists, who are now complaining so loudly, helped Brexit along hugely. They thought if we left the EU, the border created 100 years ago between Ireland and the North would be meaningful again. Mrs Foster was one of the chief enablers of the hard Brexit. “There will be no border down the Irish Sea,” the Prime Minister promised her party, last August, “over my dead body.” The DUP were reassured, then betrayed. The Protocol has brought Ulster not further from the south, from Ireland, but further from the UK. The target of the party’s anger is Mrs Foster. As I write this, she is resigning as leader of the DUP.

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Meanwhile in the south, Sinn Féin are talking up a Border Poll. Whether the South would want us, if push came to shove, is unclear. A recent poll suggested 51% of people in the Republic favour ending partition — though there’s no plan in place, no data about costs, and the Irish Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, is cautious. Impediments abound. The North’s healthcare system is funded by the state; the south’s depends on insurance. And what will the status of the Irish language be? How will we iron out the differences in our school systems? It will be complicated and expensive, and yet: the possibility of a United Ireland is more interesting all of a sudden. And that is because the concern behind the words written on walls across Belfast is valid: the Protocol shows that we in the North are no longer wanted by the United Kingdom — or, at least, by its ruling party. We’re not liked, tolerated or understood, even vaguely.

A man who’d describe himself as a Unionist (old school), not a Loyalist, complained to me recently: “If I can’t jump in the car with the dog and go to Scotland to see the kids, without the dog having a rabies shot and a passport and a letter from the vet and whatever else they want … the kids might as well live in Spain.” As he sees it, the splintered and different nations of the United Kingdom are becoming foreign countries to each other, with not only friends but families divided. Unlike the majority in Northern Ireland, this old school Unionist voted for Brexit. He chose Britain over Europe, but Britain does not want him. When I asked who he blamed for this mess, he said, very quietly, “The British government.” Then he corrected himself. “I mean the English. This Protocol’s down to them.”

But “there is no ‘Irish Sea Border’,” tweeted Brandon Lewis, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Tory titan, on New Year’s Day. This is one strategy for overcoming the Protocol problem: pretending it doesn’t exist. Another is to say that the EU needs to be more flexible. “We are keen to see the EU engage further, which I hope it will do shortly to understand the needs and the flexibilities that are practical,” said Lewis last month. Why would the EU listen? Why would it do as it’s told?

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And why would Westminster want to be flexible while we’re on the subject? They’ve got away with it. Whoever is elected as the new leader of the DUP — and it’s unlikely to be a moderniser — will have to work with the Protocol, as Foster did. To placate the party, the Tories might throw money in our direction. (When Mrs May needed the party’s Westminster votes, she gave it a billion quid.) They might even start the bridge to Scotland. Stranger things have happened. The people behind the placards in Belfast are unlikely to be placated. But what can they do?

Whatever happens, as a citizen of this place, I no longer believe (as I did once) that we are evolving into a stable hybrid. We’re not going to be grand. We will stagger on — that’s all. And if, occasionally, we complain, England will object to the noise, and nothing — absolutely nothing — will change.

When lockdown began, I was running a weekly drama class in HMP Maghaberry, a Category A, high security prison south-west of Belfast. In a room with a set of narrow glass slits — referred to sometimes as ‘Judas windows’ — through which officers sitting outside would supervise, we read and ‘performed’ a vast array of plays, from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to Max Frisch’s The Fire Raisers and Jane Thornton’s Shakers (yes, the play about cocktail waitresses). In the background was the noise of the hundreds of starlings that make HMP Maghaberry their home. At the end of every session, I took home the stories and scripts the men had written, returning them at the start of the following week’s session, marked and subbed.

One man, I shall call him Adam, gave me a story every week. His great passions were Camus (no surprise there: in my experience almost all prisoners love Albert because of his subject, which is personal responsibility) and Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is best known for his mid-career metaphysical stories about circular closed worlds, but Adam venerated those early and late Borges tales shorn of political content and psychology. He was Irish Republican, militant and Left-wing, but this was the kind of fiction he wanted to write.

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When the course started, the amount of time devoted to prose was small: we focused on performing plays. But come January, as Covid-19 loomed into view, we began to spend more time on prose. This made sense: if I had to stop going in, there would be no more performances, and the men would have to make do for themselves. They wanted to bank as much input from me as they could get.

Halfway through March, Adam handed me four stories — perhaps 10,000 words of material in all. He’d always been a prolific writer, but even so — four was a lot. I promised him I would mark them up and return them to him the next Friday. But there was no next Friday, because over the following days lockdown put an end to the class.

But what should I do with his stories? I spoke to my employer. We agreed I must read them, sub them, mark them and return them.

And so, it came to pass, that a fortnight into self-isolation as per the Government’s instructions, I set about the task. I opened the buff Northern Ireland Prison Service folder the stories were in, pulled out the first and began to read.

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Prisoners, Adam began, typically don’t pay much attention to what day of the week it is and they certainly don’t pay any attention to the date. Instead, they live in an untethered present tense, the text continued; they are in prison, in time, yes, floating along, but exactly where they are they don’t bother themselves with, particularly. Well, what’s the point? It’s only going to draw attention to the immense distance between where they are and freedom (in prison even a day can seem immense).

But there is one date all prisoners can always, immediately, call to mind. Without it they can’t sustain the hope that keeps them buoyant — that date, of course, is when they will be released. Most know what day of the week the date falls on. Some even know the hour they will leave (for the hour of exit varies — sometimes they’re out at 8am; sometimes it’s 3am.) Yes, the day it all ends: this is concrete and recondite.

As fiction so often does, Adam’s opening paragraph arrived just when it was needed. Everything I had been used to — travelling to the prison to work, travelling to Trinity College to teach, staying in Dublin and seeing my friends — had finished abruptly. In their place had begun a curtailed eighteenth century sort of life during which I gardened, walked, worked from home and once a week went to the local supermarket in Enniskillen. I was lucky to be able to do all these things — many couldn’t, in lockdown — but when I looked down the track, I didn’t like what I could see: the contraction of the publishing industry and the possible end of university teaching as we know it. Every page in my diary, which stretched to the end of the year, was now blank.

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Adam’s paragraph arrived just as I was wondering how long lockdown (with all its attendant anxieties) was going to last. A few weeks? Three months? Six months? A year? Forever? I hadn’t thought about it consciously before but now I realised this imprecision was finagling and discombobulating and psychically destabilising. I should have known from my 30 years teaching in jails that when your freedoms are limited you must know when, no matter how far off, the key will turn. To be deprived of that sends the mind wild, as mine, I now saw, had been running.

And then — for this is how the mind works, how it helps us if we can only listen — into my mind came a memory, unbidden, of the room where I had taught those drama classes. Years ago, I sat at a computer with a man who’d been ‘imprisoned for public protection’. IPP sentences were scrapped in 2012, but they dictated that a prisoner would be jailed for no definite period of time. We were discussing Tim Lott’s The Scent of Dried Roses (a devastating account of the author’s near suicide and his mother’s suicide) and from that magnificent, melancholy text the IPP prisoner segued, inevitably I suppose, to his own infernal situation of absolute untetheredness. He found it intolerable, he said, but having lived with it for a number of years, he had learnt one thing that helped.

He had come to accept he had no power, he said, certainly not vis-à-vis the criminal justice system. He had no power over the regime either. His day was preordained — unlock, ablutions, education, lunch, and so on and so on forth, all at set, unvarying times; his day was all marked out. His autonomy was shot. But, he concluded, there was no point fighting or grumbling or complaining. It was what it was. He was this untethered thing — the analogy he used was a feather — and he blew here, and he blew there, and he lighted where he lighted; his task, as one thing after the next happened to him, was just to be.

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This memory of someone else’s epiphany meant a great deal to me. I have derived enormous advantages from the way society has organised itself over the past 40 years. I have been able to go where I want, do what I want, consume what I want. And then, it went — not all of it but most of it and what replaced it was a kind of ersatz incarceration, incarceration-lite if you prefer. My life in lockdown was a hell of a lot better than being in prison; but I have a better sense now of what IPP prisoners experienced than I did when I taught them. So there is another unexpected outcome of lockdown: it has the capacity to radically alter what you previously thought you understood.

Having remembered my conversation with that IPP prisoner, I went back to Adam’s story. I read it through. It was a good tale in the Kipling style, though being written by an Irish prisoner it didn’t have any of Kipling’s unattractive opinions. I marked the text and wrote my report. I felt lighter than when I started.

We have had weeks and weeks of sunshine and clear blue skies in Ireland and everything is thriving in my garden. The grass is a hallucinatory green, and all my fruit trees are in blossom. Their blossom, to quote Dennis Potter, is the blossomiest blossom I have ever seen. As I sit here, looking out, I think about Adam (who has no lush grasses or apple trees in blossom to gaze at). He will have his stories and my comments at some point. Perhaps they’ve already arrived and he’s in the education room, leafing through the pages, hearing the starlings twittering outside, indifferent, like the rest of nature, to our current plight. Perhaps he’s even thinking about Camus, who knew all about indifference and its bracing, searing, honesty.

Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin leader, is exultant. Gerry Adams — now billed on his Twitter feed as an ‘Optimistic Activist’, and cultivating an increasingly bardic, elder statesman appearance — posted a clip of himself and colleagues enthusiastically singing the IRA song Come Out Ye Black and Tans with lines such as “and the dirty English feet they walked all over us”, and “tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away”.  The lyrics of the song, although officially referring to the old IRA of the War of Independence era, take on a darker, sharper flavour when sung by a Belfast-born former leader of the modern Provisional IRA campaign.

The same song was belted out by Sinn Féin’s Dessie Ellis and his supporters, draped in a giant tricolour, at his victorious election count in Dublin North-West (Ellis, who served 10 years in prison, was once better known as an accomplished Provisional IRA bomb-maker and explosives expert). To be fair, Sinn Féin didn’t save all the songs until after the count: during the campaign itself, a party election van toured Kingscourt, Co Cavan on behalf of candidate Pauline Tully with the chorus “ooh, ah, up the ‘RA!” blasting out the windows (Tully later claimed that “perhaps” the audio had been superimposed on the recording).

There was a time when such republican triumphalism would have wholly alienated mainstream opinion in the Republic of Ireland. Yet today, although many Irish people have indeed indicated their strong unease with such scenes — a discomfort that will no doubt find its voice in coming weeks — a growing number of Irish voters now interpret it as forgivable nationalist exuberance.

That is not how it will sound, I fear, either to the families of more than 1,700 people killed by the Provisional IRA during its long and bloody campaign, or to unionists of any variety in Northern Ireland.

Why does support for Sinn Féin plummet sharply among the over-65s? Perhaps because a 70-year-old, born in the Republic of Ireland in 1950, would have been 20 or so when the Troubles began in Northern Ireland. Over nearly three decades, he or she would have witnessed the raw pain and chaos unleashed by republican and loyalist paramilitary violence. For many of this generation, Sinn Féin remains synonymous with the Provisional IRA, and to them the atrocities committed by the IRA were not abstract, but very real.

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For today’s younger Irish voters, however, IRA violence belongs to history. For those with the inclination to romanticise it, the organisation’s long campaign is now distant enough from their actual experience to count as a form of radical chic. For others, that history may simply dwindle in importance when set next to the current appeal of Sinn Féin’s energetic promises on house-building, health service funding and heavily flagged support for causes such as trans activism. Those who wanted to shift politics to the left could always have voted for Brendan Howlin’s Irish Labour party, of course, but its campaign was widely felt to lack Sinn Féin’s pizzazz.

The scale of Sinn Féin’s success has taken Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael by surprise. It has also taken the party itself by surprise: such were its expectations, it fielded only 42 candidates in the race for the 159 seats. But the fact that there has been a sudden, seismic political change in the Republic of Ireland does not greatly surprise me.

In UnHerd last December I reviewed Fintan O’Toole’s book Heroic Failure, The Politics of Pain, in which he argued, among other things, that Brexit was a uniquely English act of self-harm partly inspired by a misplaced nostalgia for Empire. I disagreed, because I thought that many of the destabilising factors that led to the ‘Leave’ vote in the UK – a housing crisis, income inequality, precarious employment among the ‘working poor’ and a widespread unease about the meaning or dividends of national identity – were held in common with Ireland, and could well erupt there in a different form.

While the UK “somnambulist state” had long ignored voters’ fundamental concerns, I wrote, Ireland would be foolish to do the same, “and to believe that just because Ireland isn’t England, the painful fall-out from such a question is inevitably very far away”.

The fall-out has come even sooner than expected. Irish voters were reacting to long-term Fine Gael policy failures on housing, welfare provision and healthcare, the Irish version of the “somnambulist state”.  The result was a localised brew of the populism that has already intoxicated so many other countries – in this case embodied in Sinn Féin’s combination of energetic Left-wing economic pledges, zeal on ‘social justice issues’ and pugnacious Irish nationalism, all bound up with its chilling legacy from 30 years of armed conflict.

What did surprise me a little, however, was the muted response from a commentator such as O’Toole, who has previously been so intensely and eloquently exercised by populist surges in the UK and the US. Yet, with Sinn Féin electoral successes already looming last week, he quickly concluded in a column that “there can be no progressive government in Ireland without Sinn Féin”. Sinn Féin was a “party of change”, he said, “a radical party” – and although he personally was very uncomfortable at its history, “younger people” have decided that the “political statute of limitations on atrocities” had expired.

O’Toole said, however, that on no account must ministers in a Dublin Sinn Féin government seek instruction from very senior IRA figures, as they had done in Stormont: “This is intolerable in a democracy. If Sinn Féin were to take office in Dublin, a precondition would have to be a strengthening of the official code of conduct for ministers to explicitly ban such unaccountable influence.”

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But who, exactly, might police this ‘precondition’? Would Mary Lou McDonald, for example, be prevented from discussing policy matters with her former party leader Gerry Adams, or Adams be stopped from discussing anything he liked thereafter with the broad range of ‘veteran republicans’ in his acquaintance?

The idea that assiduous Irish government officials could somehow effectively prevent or sanction the flow of information between Sinn Féin and the IRA is frankly ludicrous. But such statements nonetheless offer a window on to a worrying illusion, that it is somehow possible to invite Sinn Féin into the running of the Irish state and fully expect the party meekly to abide by new rules.

This electoral outcome is what Gerry Adams has long wanted and worked towards. He is not likely to lose interest in it now. Back in 2017, a former member of the IRA’s West Belfast brigade said this about Adams to Henry McDonald of the Guardian: “He still thinks he can push them on to power in the south [Irish Republic] as his final achievement. So he will be staying around, in the back room, working the controls.”

Many in the Republic of Ireland will point out that Sinn Féin has long participated in government in Northern Ireland (admittedly with a recent three-year break, when Northern Ireland had no power-sharing government at all). But the Stormont administration is devolved, with ultimate power still remaining in London. It was designed as part of a difficult, complicated package to persuade republican and loyalist paramilitaries to exchange a violent 30-year conflict for electoral politics, and is therefore a uniquely odd political structure — consisting of compulsory coalitions in which ministries are doled out like fiefdoms to different parties, the mechanism of government is prone to freezing, and irregular financial practices once thrived (as was exposed during the ‘ash for cash’ RHI scandal).

The democratising of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland delivered a welcome cessation of sectarian violence. But it has also paramilitarised democracy: driven Northern Irish voters to the political extremes, entrenched sectarianism, permitted loyalist and dissident republican illegal activity to flourish in working-class areas, and failed to resolve the ongoing horror of paramilitary beatings and shootings, which hardly ever result in a conviction. None of this is an enviable template, I would think, for the Republic of Ireland.

The Republic, in contrast, is an independent sovereign country, which ultimately resolved its own painful arguments over independence and partition to forge a largely successful and confident modern state. It did not need to beckon Sinn Féin and its Provisional IRA legacy into government; its voters have done so not by compulsion, but by choice, because of dissatisfaction with their existing establishment. They have signalled their desire for a very different political party. But I am not sure that all of Sinn Féin’s new voters have realised exactly what forms that difference may take.

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Most modern political parties are haunted by similar things: the long legacies of bad policies, ideological schisms, media gaffes and personality clashes. Sinn Féin is unusual, however, in that it has a particular problem with mothers — mothers who pursue the party leadership asking for justice, even while it is attempting to conduct soft-voiced conversations with a forgetful electorate.

The late Jean McConville is one such mother. A working-class widow, the mother of 10 was seized from her West Belfast home by a group of IRA members in December 1972. She was driven across the Irish border and into County Louth, where she was shot in the back of the head and secretly buried on a sandy beach — or, in the terminology of such killings, ‘disappeared’. McConville’s traumatised young children were split up and sent to care institutions.

As adults, a number of the McConville children courageously began to ask the IRA questions about their mother’s death. They requested answers from the then Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams. The more that came to light about the McConville murder, the more troubling it became for the public image of Sinn Féin: two former Belfast IRA members with close involvement in the McConville murder, Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes, both alleged that the order for the killing was given by Adams himself in his role as their Belfast ‘officer commanding’, something which he denied.

The McConville case — long the subject of newspaper articles — was recently forensically examined in an Orwell prize-winning book Say Nothing, by the US writer Patrick Radden Keefe. It details the IRA’s contemptuous attitude to the human rights of those it regarded as opponents, not least the right to life.

Adams has now retired as Sinn Féin President, ceding the role in 2018 to Mary Lou McDonald, who has spearheaded the party’s electoral drive in the Republic of Ireland. McDonald does not carry the same whiff of cordite: she was born and educated in Dublin and has no direct IRA involvement, although she has in the past been active in IRA commemorations. Yet McDonald, too, was haunted by a mother throughout this election campaign. This time the mother is alive, and her name is Breege Quinn.

Breege Quinn, an elegant, quietly determined Cullyhanna woman, and her husband Stephen, are still seeking justice over the death of their 21-year-old son Paul, who was beaten to death in an October 2007 attack carried out by local members of the IRA.

Paul and a friend were lured to an isolated cattle-shed in County Monaghan on the promise of work. The phone call had come from another friend, who was forced to make the call under threat. Paul arrived to find about a dozen masked IRA men waiting for him.

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It was an intensely brutal and professional operation. His attackers beat Paul with nail-studded clubs and iron bars for over half an hour. At one point, an assailant shouted out to his horrified friends, confined in a nearby shed: “Can you hear your friend squealing?” Paul Quinn died in hospital: every major bone in his body had been broken and his ear was hanging off.

The local Sinn Féin politician Conor Murphy — now a Sinn Féin finance minister in the resurrected Stormont government — said at the time that the IRA was not involved in the murder. He also said: “Paul Quinn was involved in smuggling and criminality, I think everyone accepts that.” A subsequent report from the Independent Monitoring Commission found that current and former members of the Provisional IRA had been involved in the murder, although it concluded that the attack did not happen with the authorisation of the leadership.

When Paul’s death became an issue in this election, Mary Lou McDonald denied that Murphy had made an allegation of criminality about Quinn, until journalists confronted her directly with Murphy’s quotation to the BBC at the time. At that point McDonald admitted that Murphy had indeed said it, whereupon he – at last – apologised for his remarks and “unreservedly withdrew them”.

In the immediate aftermath of the Quinn killing, Murphy had done everything he could to minimise any suggestion of IRA involvement, including making an allegation that caused continuing pain to the Quinn family. The allegation was only retracted 13 years later, under considerable political pressure in the heat of a landmark general election.

Quinn’s family say that Paul was in fact murdered because he got into arguments with the local IRA. The IRA members resented the fact that he seemed unafraid of them. In that, this terrible killing followed a recognisable pattern for the post-ceasefire IRA — its recurrent, disproportionate fury at young, physically strong Catholic men who refused to kowtow to local IRA authority.

Over 20 years ago, I reported on the IRA murder of Andrew Kearney, a 33-year-old West Belfast man who had reportedly been involved in a fist-fight with a north Belfast IRA commander in which the IRA man came off worse. That victory was unlucky for Mr Kearney, because in July 1998 — only a few months after the Belfast Agreement was signed — at least five IRA men battered their way into his flat in the New Lodge, where he was looking after his two-week-old daughter. They disabled the telephone and the lift, overpowered Kearney — allegedly with chloroform — dragged him out to the landing, shot him three times and left him to bleed to death.

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I recall meeting his white-haired mother Maureen Kearney, a life-long Irish republican who was now doggedly demanding answers from Sinn Féin: as a gesture, she took her son’s funeral bill to Sinn Féin headquarters, but never got a reply. Gerry Adams called at the house to commiserate with her loss, and promised to return, but never did. Maureen Kearney died a year later, broken-hearted. No-one was ever convicted of Andrew Kearney’s killing.

Then, in January 2005, Robert McCartney — another 33-year-old Belfast Catholic man — was murdered outside a Belfast city centre bar. An altercation had occurred between McCartney and his friend Brendan Devine and a group which included prominent IRA men and numerous Sinn Féin representatives. It ended in a ferocious attack in which McCartney and Devine both had their throats slit: McCartney died in hospital. More than 70 people were in the bar at the time, yet there were no witnesses. During the dispute, it appeared that they were all in the toilet. After the murder, the IRA sealed off the scene, removed CCTV and forensically cleaned the bar.

Mr McCartney’s sisters and fiancée fought a long-running international campaign to bring his killers to account. Despite a trial involving three men — including one who was charged with McCartney’s murder — no-one was convicted. The case failed due to the lack of witness testimony and undisputed evidence.

One of the two men charged with, and acquitted of, affray in relation to the McCartney attack, Jim McCormick, was the Sinn Féin treasurer in South Belfast at the time. He was later sentenced to 14 and a half years for the attempted murder of another man, Joe Henry, by stabbing.

The McCartney case had notable similarities with a murder that happened a few months later, in Dublin, of a 29-year-old called Joe Rafferty. Rafferty, a hard-working courier and fitness fan, had got into a dispute with another local man after the man allegedly assaulted his sister. The man threatened him, speaking of his connections to the IRA, and the threats escalated, followed by approaches of Rafferty’s worried family to a Sinn Féin councillor to have the threats withdrawn, and his reported assurance that nothing more would come of it. In April 2005, Rafferty was shot twice and killed as he left his Dublin flat to go to work. An Independent Monitoring Commission report found that “a member or former member of PIRA may have been involved” and that members of Sinn Féin and PIRA “were aware in advance of the threat and did not take sufficient action to prevent it”.

In 2016 the jury at an inquest into Rafferty’s murder delivered the verdict that he had been unlawfully killed by a person unknown. Rafferty’s sister, Esther Uzell-Rafferty, said, “that line is hard to listen to because we know who killed Joseph. It makes me so angry” – but, to secure a conviction, they needed more witnesses to come forward with information.

Despite the ongoing torment of the families involved, a popular line of argument during this election has been, “Why does this stuff even matter? It’s all in the past, isn’t it?” Sinn Féin, under McDonald, are keen to represent themselves as progressive and forward-thinking, increasingly distanced from IRA violence while simultaneously profiting from a carefully sentimentalised and historicised vision of “the armed struggle”.

Yet this election has shown that Sinn Féin does not want to disown its IRA past; it wants to control, curate and selectively celebrate it — to turn the agonising human detail of an intensely sad, squalid sectarian conflict into something hazy, generalised and noble.

The real stories stubbornly resist that narrative. Andrew Kearney. Robert McCartney. Joseph Rafferty. Paul Quinn. All these post-Belfast Agreement killings — of fit young Catholic men who could handle themselves in a fight — have certain factors in common. A perceived slight by the victim against a local IRA member or members. An IRA retaliation of extraordinary violence, resulting in murder. A cover-up, a public denial of IRA involvement by Sinn Féin, and the spreading of rumours about the victim’s alleged involvement in criminal activity. The intimidation and silencing of witnesses. The politically soothing judgement that the killing was not “officially sanctioned” by the IRA at the highest levels. A persistent campaign by relatives of the dead man who refuse to be cowed by the IRA, resulting in a measure of media attention — which, when it reaches a critical point, leads prominent Sinn Féin politicians to utter conciliatory words and publicly seek contact with the victim’s family.

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When the spotlight moves away, however, the “concern” for victims quickly evaporates. An insight into how Sinn Féin really views those who have been harmed or bereaved by the IRA was given by a 2017 WhatsApp chat linked to the Sinn Féin TD Dessie Ellis and used by party members.

When the prospect of a snap general election was raised, one user complained that it would result in the media being “on the phone to Cahill, Stack, Quinn and all and every other waster they can wheel out with a sob story”. The names cited referred to Mairia Cahill, who went public with the testimony that she was abused as a teenager by a senior IRA member and that the IRA covered up the abuse; Austin Stack, the son of a Portlaoise chief prison officer murdered by the IRA in 1983; and the parents of Paul Quinn.

Sinn Féin is clearly resentful of the fact that these individuals speak to the media at all. They’re supposed to know their place, and keep quiet. A common theme among Sinn Féin supporters on social media during the election campaign was that the media had disgracefully ‘exploited’ the Quinn family. It fell to journalists such as Suzanne Breen, an experienced Northern Ireland reporter and commentator, politely to remind Twitter users that she had been covering the Quinn story in detail since Paul’s murder in 2007, when his parents first began their campaign for justice. If the public hadn’t paid attention before, it wasn’t for a lack of available information.

A significant proportion of the Irish electorate, however, has decided that Sinn Féin’s history is no longer an issue – and the principle of democracy is that what voters want, or think they want, voters get.

Yet, looking North, there is one particular paradox of Sinn Féin’s success. Since it is the most hardline nationalist party, its poll-topping performance has already caused some to talk of a border poll and a united Ireland as a genuine possibility. At the same time, the triumphalist nature of its republicanism also makes unionists much less likely to see their future in an agreed united Ireland.

Post-Brexit, some Remain-voting Unionists – particularly among the middle classes – were softening in their attitude to joining an economically successful, socially liberal Republic of Ireland. One component of this softening was the belief that the air in the Republic of Ireland was not as toxic, in sectarian terms, as that of Northern Ireland, where the loyalist UDA and UVF and Sinn Féin regularly commemorate members linked to appalling deeds which in any conventional war would be considered war crimes.

Sinn Féin’s sudden accession in the Republic will have stalled that instinct in some unionists, and replaced it with a deep apprehension. The atmosphere has changed: even the most post-political unionist would now think twice about entering a united Ireland to the theme tune of “ooh, ah, Up the ‘RA!’”.

There’s a line of Milan Kundera’s, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The steep ascent of Sinn Féin towards power in the Republic of Ireland represents the temporary triumph of forgetting. In the past the party, too, has shown itself to be very effective in enforcing silences. One can even sense a silence spreading in Ireland now, as many of those who are normally loquacious on Twitter fall uncharacteristically quiet on their opinion of the election results, as if trying to puzzle out their own place in the altered political order. I predict that ultimately Sinn Féin’s victory will create a new ideological schism in mainstream Irish society.

Once the election excitement dies down, however, Ireland must surely brace itself for a different and searching national conversation. The questions for Sinn Féin, and the grieving relatives, won’t go away, you know: memory has a way of knocking to be let back in.

That year, from one March to the next, saw rising IRA and loyalist paramilitary violence, the introduction of internment, and the fateful events of Bloody Sunday, on which British army paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed demonstrators at a Londonderry civil rights march. Thereafter, things descended into greater mayhem: the summer of 1972 ushered in Bloody Friday, on which 20 IRA bombs exploded across Belfast in different locations.

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I was too young to be aware of such events, but by the time that I was even dimly cognisant of our contorted politics — in the mid-to-late 70s — individuals and political patterns were entrenched in ways that were to endure for decades. Ian Paisley, who began as a young loyalist firebrand, had by 1971 gained both a Westminster seat and his own party, the Democratic Unionists.

Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness had been identified as key representatives of the IRA when they were flown to London for secret talks with Willie Whitelaw in 1972. By 2007 such “players”, formerly of the extremes, were firmly at the centre, and in charge: Paisley and McGuinness were leading a new Stormont government as First and Deputy First Minister respectively.

The family that I grew up in was pro-Union and Protestant but non-sectarian. My father was a barrister and also an independent Unionist politician, but I had little notion of Catholics as alien: we had Catholic relatives and family friends. It seemed to me that aspiring to a united Ireland by peaceful means, like an attachment to union with the UK, was a justifiable political viewpoint that could be debated.

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The heavily electrified dividing-line lay not in religion or political views, but in the means you were prepared to use to get there. Both the republican paramilitaries (the IRA and the INLA) and the loyalist paramilitaries (the UVF and the UDA) openly considered it acceptable to murder people in order either to advance the cause of a United Ireland or to defend the status quo in the United Kingdom. They had a broad and elastic range of “legitimate targets”.

Sometimes the “legitimate targets” were politicians. When I was at primary school in 1981, the IRA shot dead the Ulster Unionist MP Robert Bradford at his South Belfast constituency office. Two years later, the IRA gunned down the young unionist politician and law lecturer Edgar Graham, in the grounds of Queen’s University opposite my secondary school.

Other brutal killings of politicians stuck in our communal memory — back in 1973, Loyalist paramilitaries had murdered the nationalist Senator Paddy Wilson and his girlfriend, Irene Andrews. Both unionist and nationalist politicians were routinely offered personal protection weapons. The entire society was permanently mined with unease.

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By the time I was 10 or 11, it was clear to me that, once the dehumanising of the people on the other side of the political divide got started in earnest, some very dark territory awaited. Separately from that, it was becoming evident that the pro-Union position in Northern Ireland was a psychologically complicated one. It involved a loyalty to Great Britain and a shared history cemented in the losses of two world wars, combined with constant insecurity about the degree to which the affection was requited.

Northern Irish unionists were British in Ireland and Irish in Britain. They belonged to neither nation’s mythic conception of itself. The wider Northern Protestant tradition contained plenty to be proud of — its history of dissent, its industrial capabilities, writers, musicians and sporting heroes — but too often an intensely localised culture of Orange marching bands and gigantic bonfires drew negative media attention and threatened narrowly to define it.

No broader tribe was waiting to welcome Northern unionists warmly, and in any case — from what I could see — tribal loyalties had a way of turning nasty. Although a sense of identity is important to everyone, I began to be suspicious of any overweening communal identification that overrode individual values.

*

I have now lived in London for 25 years. Part of England’s appeal used to be the calmer way in which politics was discussed. Yet something else felt different in London too: a more acute class consciousness. In recent years it has become increasingly apparent to me that, in many ways, class is to England what religion is to Northern Ireland.

George Osborne, as Chancellor of a government heavily dominated by former pupils of England’s leading public schools, pressed home an austerity budget in 2012 with the words: “We’re all in this together”. We weren’t, of course. A report for the Institute of Fiscal Studies in 2015 found that low-income families with children bore the brunt of the coalition government’s austerity drive.

Official austerity collided with a new style of labour market — the rise of zero-hours contracts, without holiday or sick pay — and an overheating UK housing market, mingled with a severe shortage of social housing. The combination has, in recent years, seen the emergence of the “working poor”, who struggle to make ends meet despite being in employment.

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The Leave vote was in part an expression of political frustration from those in England and Wales who had felt marginalised by their new set of circumstances and wished to return their government to more direct accountability.

If many low-income Leave voters seemed unconcerned about the potential economic effect, that is partly because the system was already working out so badly for them that they preferred to accept even a short-term worsening of their circumstances in exchange for a gamble on a different long-term deal. It may be a gamble in which the odds remain stacked against them, but it was not wholly irrational.

There were many means by which this polarisation by geography, class and age — evidence of which bubbled up after the referendum — could have been avoided. One such means lay in how different social groups talked — or rather, didn’t talk — to each other.

Over the decades that I have lived in London, I’ve gradually noticed a broader contempt for the working class creeping into both public policy and the language of the more socially influential and financially secure — the notion that, if poorer people were failing to rise, it wasn’t because of any barriers placed in their way, but because they were simply what the UK meritocracy had left behind. The poor were seen as a kind of inevitable underclass: not quite fully equal citizens, but a form of societal sludge.

The better-educated and better-off have had a tendency to close down discussions which, in all fairness, should have ended with the considered redistribution of national resources.

One example relates to immigration and housing. It is generally accepted that higher rates of net immigration place a greater strain on social housing supply. That’s not because foreign-born UK residents use social housing at any greater rate — foreign-born usage is roughly the same as that of UK-born people — but simply because a rapidly expanding population naturally requires more social housing provision, and construction rates haven’t kept up.

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Not long ago, I watched an edition of BBC Question Time in which a man in the audience said something like: “I’m not racist, but with all these foreigners coming in my daughter can’t get a council house.” I knew that the immediate middle-class reaction to his blunt phrasing about “all these foreigners” would be to conclude that this man was indeed a racist or xenophobe, and dismiss his comments thereafter. And sometimes “I’m not racist, but…” is indeed a prelude to a racist remark.

But suppose policymakers took what the man said at face value? Suppose that, just as he said, he wasn’t a racist, but his experience was that high rates of net immigration — including that of some families categorised as at higher priority need — really did lessen his daughter’s chances of getting affordable, secure social housing?

The discussion wouldn’t have had to end up in resentment of foreigners. A better-functioning democracy, maybe one less imbued with class consciousness, might have actually listened. It might, perhaps, have concluded that — though freedom of movement brought significant benefits for UK citizens — lower-income groups were disproportionately likely to experience any negative effects of a rapidly expanding population.

To counter this, a succession of governments might have made it a clear priority to build social housing at a much higher rate, so that there was a better supply for all those who needed it. That way, UK-born people on lower incomes wouldn’t have been in competition with a growing number of foreign-born UK residents for a shrinking resource, for which 1.1 million households are now on the waiting list.

None of this national conversation happened, of course. The reason was that, for very many years, those in positions of power quite literally couldn’t find the common language for an honest, pragmatic discussion on sharply rising rates of immigration.

Socially and economically, I’m solidly in the metropolitan middle class. But I’ve absorbed enough lessons from my birthplace to understand the dangers of automatically dismissing and deriding people who don’t think exactly like you.

*

The decision to ‘Leave’ or ‘Remain’ is a genuine strategic and cultural disagreement — in this case on Britain’s long-term economic outlook, our government’s political accountability to the people, the nature of British and European identity, and our role within the wider world.

Despite our current flamboyant political chaos, there are arguments on both sides, neither of which require the automatic reduction of one to “traitors” and “enemies of the people” or the other to “morons” and “racists”. But tribal excitement is in the air.

I like Twitter, for its fast-moving coverage of politics and access to direct sources. For a time now, however, we have all seen the escalation of deeply nasty rhetoric, often from an angry, hard Leave perspective from outside the London sphere of influence — including anonymous, vicious threats to female MPs such as Anna Soubry, Diane Abbott and Jess Phillips. The UK is in a troubling place when judges are receiving death threats from Leave zealots and MPs require police protection from baying crowds on both sides.

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Yet, increasingly, individuals with more prominent public voices, often on the Remain side, are joining in the nastiness, and delighting in crude insults or crafting ornately obscene insults for retweets and likes.

I’m not talking about passionate political disagreement, but statements that relish imputing the basest motives to those who think differently; people with whom, in any future version of the UK, the speaker will nonetheless have to share a country.

A couple of recent examples, among many — singled out only because they are freshest in the memory: firstly, the Guardian journalist Zoe Williams tweeting that the 76-year-old Labour MP Ronnie Campbell is a “scab” for deciding to vote for Boris Johnson’s withdrawal deal. (Campbell, incidentally, is an ex-miner who went down the pits at 14 and was on picket lines during the miner’s strike.)

Secondly, the writer John Niven tweeting a picture of his sweet-faced young daughter about to march in protest against Brexit (while carrying a large banner reading “Cock, Piss, Brexit”) — and attacking anyone who objected as a “gammon” and much worse.

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I have lost count of the number of times reasonably well-known comedians, writers and commentators, incensed by the prospect of Britain leaving the EU, have called people they disagree with politically a “cunt” (although usually the word is embroidered with further eye-catching expletives to jazz it up). Each time, it brings me up a bit short. Maybe this feels to them like a swashbuckling expression of justified fury; they think it’s okay because they’re so sure they’re right. But then people on all sides think they’re right.

My political awakening involved a growing mistrust of tribal intensity, and a wariness of extreme rhetoric. To this I can now add a third element, contrary to what I might once have imagined — the realisation that England really isn’t so different from Northern Ireland, now that Brexit has given it a way to divide itself in two.

Be careful with the excitement, England, for those of you who are presently carried away with the thrill of belonging, the sudden exhilaration of full-throttle hating. After a while, you will become indistinguishable from your means, and your means will distort the ends. Believe me, it won’t be the first time that has happened.

It only struck me some time after reading two superb books on the Booker shortlist this year – Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black and Anna Burns’ Milkman – that they had something in common: both draw much of their force from the protagonist’s watchful, wary navigation of looming threats. They reveal this, however, using completely different styles.

Washington Black first unfurls in a Barbados sugar plantation in 1830: its story is told in the first person, through the eyes of Wash, who is an enslaved boy of 10 or 11 when the story starts with the ominous arrival of a “tall, impatient, sickly” new master. Wash senses evil: “He owned me, as he owned all those I lived among, not only our lives but also our deaths, and that pleased him too much.” Edugyan’s writing style is poetic and clear, with an ear for the verbal formality of the era: the brutality of slavery seeps through the elegant prose.

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One piercing aspect of this book – particularly in the pages before Wash flees the plantation – is its understanding of how keenly sharp a sense of vigilance is needed to survive in a brutally untrustworthy world. Small errors of judgement might lead indirectly to violent beatings or worse; the faintest danger must be scented far in advance of its arrival. Fear is written in the involuntary responses of the body, even before it is clarified in the mind: “I felt the soft tremor of my hands in my lap.”

When an older white man, Mister Philip, compels Wash to accompany him to an isolated spot and then proceeds to shoot himself, the thing that really terrifies Wash is not “the sudden violence, which had been with me since birth, but from the terrible fact that I alone had been present at the death of a white man”. With an unforced touch, the depth of slavery’s internal reach is conveyed. Escape, when it comes, is all the more welcome.

The 18-year-old female protagonist of Milkman inhabits an unnamed city and time, but one that looks and feels very like 1970s Belfast, where the author grew up in the thick of the Troubles. The narrator, known only as “middle-sister”, has much more freedom to steer her fate than Wash, of course, but she too must be vigilant: she moves in a volatile community, mined with potential violence, where the constant slosh of rumour and grudges can suddenly harden into open threat.

When a powerful paramilitary known only as “Milkman” begins to stalk her, a complex weight of judgements descends upon her. Burns’ mode of writing is radically different from that of Edugyan: nerviness is baked into the style, which is full of concealments, layered considerations and circumlocutions, the highways and byways of a mind under intensifying stress. Real names are not revealed, and nor are those of terrorist organisations – they are “renouncers” or “defenders” – and the steady warping of domestic life is signalled by slick piles of murdered dogs and a headless cat.

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The reviewer in the New York Times called Milkman “interminable” and “wilfully demanding and opaque” – but I had quite the opposite experience: I found it consistently gripping and darkly funny. Perhaps, being from Belfast myself, both its cadences and its caginess were more immediately familiar. There’s still a bit in many of us from that city that – when asked too forward a question – instinctively responds: “Who wants to know?”

For those who, following Milkman, have an appetite for another book set in Belfast, I can recommend rediscovering Brian Moore’s brilliant 1955 novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, about a Catholic spinster struggling to stay afloat in fraying circumstances, as acutely poignant a portrait of loneliness as I have ever read.

Two other honourable mentions: one is Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries, translated from the German by Damion Searls. I’m still in the midst of it: at nearly 2,000 pages, with 367 chapters, it’s a behemoth of a book, but worth the commitment. The novel charts a year – between 1967 and 1968 – in the New York life of Gesine Cresspahl, a German émigré, and her young daughter Marie, as arguments rage over Vietnam; in parallel, it recounts the story of Gesine’s family during the 1930s in Jerichow, a small town in Germany. Anniversaries is a huge feat of the imagination, dense with vivid, criss-crossing detail and moral complexity: every part of history that Johnson’s pen touches springs to life.

The other pleasure was Christopher Howse’s Soho In The Eighties, an affectionate but enjoyably clear-sighted portrait of the wilfully eccentric, louche drinkers – linked to a variety of professions – who were so often bolted to bar stools in Soho boozers such as The French House and The Coach & Horses. They included Jeffrey Bernard, the former author of the Spectator’s ‘Low Life’ column, who became famous nationwide for his wit and disintegration. Howse, who drank among them, has a wonderful turn of phrase himself: he describes one filthy little pub, the Kismet, as “like drinking in a badly run public lavatory”. The ‘characters’ would have grown tedious at times in real life, I suspect: many of them enjoyed giving their well-worn catchphrases repeated outings. But there was also badinage, camaraderie, feuds and idiosyncrasies aplenty, and a kind of purity to their habitual recklessness. In an era of rampant offence-taking and aggressive public piety, this book is a welcome blast of smoky air.