Loyalists want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, while nationalists want Northern Ireland to become part of the Republic of Ireland.
The first few nights of violence began after youth in a Derry / Londonderry loyalist bag fired a gasoline bomb at police officers who had tried to interrupt their meeting.
The riots spread to four other towns and cities in Northern Ireland, reaching a fever in west Belfast last Wednesday, when about 600 people from neighboring loyalist and nationalist communities clashed along a so-called peace wall separating the two areas.
Loyalists believe the protocol poses an existential threat to the future of the union, and could destroy the Good Friday Agreement – the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement that ended the period of violent conflict known as the Troubles.
At the heart of the riots are young people – some as young as 12 – who, despite being born after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, are held hostage by the identity politics that defined that era and that created the Cadeau.
Young people have always been used as pawns for some of the sinister forces in our society, ”Pastor Stephen Reynolds, president of Conway Youth Center, told CNN.
“We like to say that they are used to doing the dirty work of the guys who don’t want to catch it.”
This was demonstrated in videos circulating on social media last week, showing adults encouraging young people who bombed and hijacked a double-decker bus on Shankill Road in Belfast.
‘They will be told it is for a reason … a loss of their identity across the border into the Irish Sea, due to the dual police system that many people in the community are talking about in connection with the [IRA’s] Bobby Storey funeral and tensions like that, ”Reynolds said.
“But whether the youth on the street in these riots understand the ins and outs of those issues, I’m not sure.”
The pastor said older generations still passed on stories of the problems to their children, which he said was one of the reasons why “we still have the problems we face today”. But he stressed that the “majority … don’t want us to go back to a time when things were really bad.”
The sectarian violence of the Troubles, between 1968 and 1998, killed more than 3,500 people.
Rebecca Dickson, a 22-year-old youth worker in training at the Conway Youth Center, said the rioters do not define the community in general and that she and her contemporaries are eager to go beyond the labels of the past.
“We’re at the stage now where we don’t care what you are, we don’t care what you represent, if you’re nice to us we’ll be nice to you,” she said. “It’s just blown out of proportion.”
“They are kids who don’t really know what’s going on,” added Dickson. “The protesters do not sit overnight reading the Brexit rules.”
“They just do it out of anger and other people’s anger I think too … they’ve heard or seen things on the news and used it to fuel their violence,” she said.
Leaders have exploited those fears, using a legacy of violence, experts say.
A project ‘built on sand’
Politicians tell communities their identities are under threat and their sense of “Britishness” is being eroded, said Jonny Byrne, an associate professor of criminology at Ulster University.
This, exacerbated by the stress of the pandemic, has led to the disorder that has been witnessed in recent weeks, said Byrne, whose research focuses on paramilitary violence, youth participation in political violence and the community’s experiences with police on public order in Northern Ireland.
He explained that while the Good Friday Agreement ended the armed conflict, it did not change the way people live together there.
“We’ve never gotten to grips with the fundamental building blocks of how to create a new society where people – Catholics and Protestants – can live together, or how to create a society where we can talk about what happened between 1969 and 1998.” Byrne told CNN.
The peace project is “so fragile, it is built on sand,” he added, explaining that it is neither mature enough nor embedded enough in society to face the pressures of Brexit, the North. Irish protocol or a global pandemic entails.
“So whenever [pressures] manifest … it comes back to the traditional format of Orange versus Green, Catholic versus Protestant, Republican versus Loyalist, and it inevitably ends in street violence and police officers getting hurt, ”he said.
Byrne noted that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the areas where violence has broken out recently are the areas disproportionately affected by the conflict.
Systemic problems
Brian Smyth, councilor of the Green Party representing the Lisnasharragh region of Belfast, told CNN that the trauma of the past has been passed down from generation to generation; without conflict transformation or reconciliation commission, the same issues remain.
“So many people on both sides of the communities feel like they have been abandoned, they have been ignored,” he said, noting that since the Good Friday Agreement, more people have taken their lives in Northern Ireland. Ireland then died in violence. during the trouble.
And education and social housing remain a troubling problem for disadvantaged communities, with youth services suffering the most from budget cuts.
“Where is our commitment to give them [the youth] hope? ‘he said.
In the 2015 paper “Inequality and Segregation in Northern Ireland Schools”, researchers Vani Borooah and Colin Knox found that 21% of 30-34 year olds had not completed post-primary education – the highest rate in the UK.
Collectively, Northern Ireland’s publicly funded secondary schools do not meet the minimum acceptable standard for post-primary schools in England, “with only 33% of Protestant secondary schools meeting that standard, compared to 41% of Catholic secondary schools. Protestant schoolboys generally fare worst of all groups.
In this environment, young people are “exploited by others,” Smyth said.
“There has been a lot of rhetoric … over the past six months, especially around Brexit, and everyone started stepping it up – comfortable old men stirring the pot, sitting in their nice houses that lived in their gardens. the ground are angry, disillusioned, disenfranchised … [they are the ones] that will also have to deal with its impact. ”
“Division, division, division, keeps some people well off and comfortable,” he added.
There was a pause in street violence this past weekend, with only “minor problems” according to police, after loyalist groups called off parades and protests following Prince Philip’s death on Friday.
That silence was held on Saturday – the anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.
But political leaders fear that violence could return next weekend after Philip’s funeral.
“We have a history in Northern Ireland where people can turn on violence and turn off violence like a faucet,” Byrne said.
Smyth wonders what it takes to stop the violence.
“If a child dies? If a police officer dies or a bus driver is attacked? Maybe this is uncomfortable for people, I think we need this conversation,” he said.
“If we’re not careful in our language, we’ll end up with corpses.”
CNN’s Salma Abdelaziz and Florence Davey-Attlee contributed to this report.