Penn Raine: Northern Ireland finds out

The outbreak of fiery protest in Northern Ireland this week has been called by some commentators ‘muscle memory’. They mean that the anger of The Troubles has been efficiently repurposed to express Irish rage against the cultural and societal imposition of migrants for whom an attempted beheading in a suburban street is acceptable behaviour.

The targeting and firebombing of Belfast’s Houses of Multiple Occupancy where asylum seekers are living is a reminder of 30 years of Troubles that ended officially in 1998, but whose memory is still raw.

There is an obvious link between the Belfast violent protests and the outrage directed at the New Hampshire Constabulary surrounding the murder of Henry Nowak, falsely accused of racial abuse and assault in similar circumstances.

However the Southampton protesters were still just asking. Asking that police acknowledge that they had put a false claim of racist language before a fatal knife attack, asking that they bend the knee for a murdered British teen as they had done for George Floyd. They went with their faces uncovered, used their cell phones to upload footage to their socials because they still trusted that what they were asking was reasonable.

And in this way they have done the prosecutors’ jobs for them. GCHQ will track their phone data and link it to CCTV footage, police will do their police work at their desks, not on the streets and Britain’s New Justice’s duopoly of Hermer and Starmer will bring the ‘full weight of the law’ against them. And more because Starmer ‘will not tolerate’ angry men shouting, ‘I can’t breathe’ and throwing wheelie bins around the streets. They will, when caught, face prison sentences.

Of course they will. Remember Lucy Connolly and Peter Lynch, jailed after the Southport massacre for using offensive language?

The Irish protest is different. Organised and focussed, protestors masked their faces, did not use phones to film, although the events were filmed carefully they were not loaded to individual’s social media posts. The properties that were attacked were researched HMOs and there were no human targets. This was a carefully curated event who actors were not asking, they were telling.

They were stating that when the state’s inattention to long expressed concerns veers into contempt, citizens may decide that the social contract has been deliberately broken.

Britain’s Channel 4 headline today is ‘Racist thuggery’. This does not refer to the savage image of a man about to lose his head, an event perhaps usual in the streets of Khartoum, but about Irishmen who expect that the state would not normalise it, would not pass it off as ‘an isolated incident’, ‘mental health trauma,’ ‘not linked to terrorism’.

The police will hope that this carefully curated violence does not spread because they do not have the resources to resist it.

Protesters will hope that Westminster has heard their message.

Penn Raine is an educator and writer who lives in NZ and France.