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In Belfast, history and mass migration are a toxic mix
The city has seen more than enough bloodshed for several lifetimes. Leaders mustn’t allow the latest tragedy to spiral
The atrocious knife attack in north Belfast, in which police say the suspect is Sudanese, brings together three uncomfortable facts about modern Northern Ireland.
First, the place is still hard-wired for sectarian politics. Second, it is now experiencing migration and demographic change that its institutions were never designed to handle. Finally, there is almost no honest public language for discussing the overlap between the two.
Northern Ireland’s 1998 political settlement assumed two big blocs and a small fringe of “others”. Power-sharing at Stormont, community funding, even the way electoral returns are analysed all rest on the Catholic/nationalist and Protestant/unionist divide.
In north Belfast that divide is especially stark. This is an area with some of the worst multiple-deprivation indicators on these islands, high levels of worklessness, poor health outcomes and some of the most segregated housing stock in the UK. Schools remain overwhelmingly split along religious lines. Interfaces and “peace lines” still carve up neighbourhoods. For many residents, identity is not an abstract matter of values; it is where you can safely walk after dark.
The statistics tell a story of gradual change, not transformation. The latest census shows the Catholic share of the population across Northern Ireland now just above 45 per cent and the Protestant share below 44 per cent, with a growing cohort of people who describe themselves as neither. In north Belfast, boundaries between green and orange districts remain sharp, but there has been a slow increase in people from ethnic minority backgrounds, including African, Asian and Eastern European communities, clustering in cheaper private rentals and some social housing developments.
Those numbers are still modest compared with English cities. But in tightly packed, low-income neighbourhoods where people already feel squeezed, even relatively small changes can be politically explosive.
When police describe a suspect in a serious incident as Sudanese, residents do not hear that in a demographic vacuum. For years, both main blocs have been told – and have told themselves – that they are under pressure. Unionists talk about being marginalised and diluted. Nationalists frame their politics around historic injustice and the unfinished business of Irish unity. Demography is treated as destiny by both.
The government now has new groups in that tense mix: families whose first language is not English, who may be Muslim in overwhelmingly Christian (or ex-Christian) districts, who arrive in an already stretched housing and welfare system. The proportion of people in Northern Ireland born outside the UK and Ireland has grown steadily over the past two decades, with African-born residents still only a few per cent in most council areas but concentrated in particular urban pockets. At street level, especially in north Belfast, it can feel like a lot of change landing in a very short time.
Most migrants, of course, are simply trying to get on with their lives, working in low-paid jobs that keep the local economy going, sending their children to school and avoiding trouble. There are also quiet success stories that rarely make headlines: integrated sports teams, churches and mosques that work together on food banks, schools where children from refugee families and local Protestant or Catholic backgrounds sit side by side.
But a post-conflict society that has never fully normalised policing still struggles with trust. Surveys routinely show lower confidence in the Police Service of Northern Ireland among people in the most deprived and most politically polarised communities. Memories of RUC heavy-handedness and of paramilitary control are not ancient history. The sense that the law is something done to your area rather than with it lives on.
Ergo high-profile crimes involving someone from a new minority group take on a symbolic weight. They become proof, for some, that “we” are being endangered so that “they” can be welcomed. Rumours race ahead of facts: that “they” get priority housing, that “they” are untouchable because authorities are terrified of being called racist, that “they” bring knives and gangs. It is a short, dangerous step from “a man with a knife” to “those people” in the local imagination.
Northern Ireland’s political language is badly out of date for the world it now inhabits. Its leaders are practised at condemning sectarian hatred but visibly uncomfortable talking about migration, integration and crime in a way that takes seriously both the rights of newcomers and the fears of long-standing residents. In this situation that reticence sounds like scolding people horrified and frightened by what’s happened for departing approved tramlines on tolerance and diversity.
A more honest conversation would start by insisting on several principles. Individuals, not communities, commit crime, and any suspect – Sudanese or otherwise – should be judged on evidence, not ethnic label. Moreover, it is perfectly legitimate for people in hard-pressed areas to worry about rapid change, especially when public services are thin and paramilitary influence still lurks in the background.
Finally, politicians have a duty not to weaponise either fear of migrants or in particular fear of racism for short-term gain. The hypocrisy of some local representatives who trade off partisan affiliation rushing to shut people up before the blood has dried on the ground is telling and counterproductive.
North Belfast has seen more than enough bloodshed for several lifetimes. The test now is whether its leaders can deal with this latest horror without dragging a fragile, changing city back into the old comfort zone of tribal blame – this time with a new minority caught in the crossfire.
[Source: Ian Acheson comment - Daily Telegraph]
