Anger Erupts in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland has had 23 years of relative “peace” between republicans and unionists, but the class war continues, even if it is still framed by the unique situation of these six counties remaining part of the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”. But the first ten days of April saw riots flare up in unionist areas of Belfast, (London)Derry, Carrickfergus, Newtownabbey, and Ballamena, discontent that was subsequently echoed in some nationalist areas. Water cannons were turned on demonstrators for the first time in years.

Ostensibly, the cause of the unrest was unionist dissatisfaction with the Brexit settlement, which effectively imposes a customs border between Britain and the whole of Ireland. Northern Ireland remains politically a part of the United Kingdom, but economically within the European Union. Before the riots started, graffiti appeared across the province calling for “no Irish Sea border”.

In November 2019, Boris Johnson assured Northern Ireland businesses and the fervently pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) that there would be “no barriers of any kind” to trade crossing the Irish Sea. So, they could all put EU customs declarations forms “in the bin”. But in January 2021, the opposite proved to be the case, with many delays to goods crossing the Irish Sea and outright bans on certain imports. Some supermarket shelves were bare.

This was like taking a baseball bat to a hornets’ nest, reawakening the unionist “siege mentality”, which goes back (at least) as far as the Siege of Londonderry of 1688-89: Northern Ireland unionists, who see themselves as more loyal to Britain and more British than the British themselves, had an opportunity to dust down their ancient grievances and give them a really good airing.

Unionists also took the opportunity to kick up a fuss about the funeral of a former commander of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) which broke lockdown rules back in June 2020. But these were just the sparks that set Belfast on fire. Social unrest and frustration already provided the tinder and gasoline.

While some sections of the petty bourgeoisie prospered, the working class of Northern Ireland has seen no meaningful improvement to its situation since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Over the past year, coronavirus has made things far worse. Businesses that had once prospered, especially in the tourism and hospitality sectors, went to the wall, throwing more people out of work and closing off opportunities to young workers. Even the traditional escape routes to London or Glasgow were now closed off. Frustration at poverty, unemployment and social deprivation inevitably boiled over. Most of the rioters in Belfast were teenagers whose experience of life has been nothing but prolonged misery and hopelessness.

The same misery exists, of course, on the other side of the “peace walls” dividing unionists from Irish nationalists. There was a possibility that youths on both sides might see a common frustration, a common interest. A common class enemy! Not surprising, then, that the two main bourgeois parties, the nationalist Sinn Féin and the unionist DUP, issued a joint statement condemning the violence.

In Northern Ireland everything is framed by the republican-unionist divide, and everything is done to maintain it, at least within the urban working class. The paramilitary organizations such as the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), which continue to operate as criminal cartels while maintaining “order” in their separate “communities”, rely on the division to stay in business. The same applies on the other side, where the IRA and its dissident factions traditionally discipline the working class and “tax” local businesses.

Tellingly, the riots were brought to a halt when the unionist establishment called for calm on 9 April to “show respect” for Prince Philip, who died that same day. Such calls for calm from the political elite are brutally enforced with threats of violence and actual punishment beatings by the UDA and UVF.

In March of this year, the UVF and Red Hand Commando renounced their current participation in the Good Friday Agreement in a letter to Boris Johnson. Things could get nasty.

The only way out of this mess is a class-based response that unites republicans and unionists, nationalists and loyalists. That is easy to say, harder to achieve, though there have been positive developments such as a long-running series of strikes by Northern Ireland nurses demanding pay parity with the rest of the United Kingdom. There was intense anger in October 2020 when the authorities refused to refund pay docked during an earlier strike – despite the extra hours of intense work that nurses put in during the pandemic.

In the workplace, the sectarian divide ceases to have meaning as common class interests come to the fore.

But the paramilitaries on both sides will do everything in their power to put the brakes on class solidarity, so that they can continue with their criminal rackets. Meanwhile the British and Irish bourgeoisies, the British and Irish political establishment, and European and American imperialism will join hands in “deploring” and “condemning” the violence in Northern Ireland while offering “solutions” that only deflect from the true causes.