The deep roots behind the recent violence in Northern Ireland

Analysis: the recent unrest is about much more than just Brexit, the Northern Ireland protocol or policing

A trade border down the Irish Sea; nationalists flouting pandemic rules at the funeral of a former IRA commander; police and prosecutors not arresting or charging anyone who attended the funeral: in the zero-sum politics of Northern Ireland, Protestant unionist and loyalist working-class youths often feel forgotten and marginalised. They are now using mayhem to get attention and leverage. However, what are the causes of the riots and how could the problem be tackled more effectively?

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From RTÉ Radio 1's Saturday With Katie Hannon, Allison Morris, Crime Correspondent with The Belfast Telegraph on the Loyalist unrest in Northern Ireland

Unemployment and underachievement

It would be easy to attribute the recent violence only to Brexit, to the Northern Ireland protocol, and to the perception of policing between the two communities, but that would be a simplification of issues. Over the past decades, there has been a growing concern about the levels of educational underachievement within loyalist working-class communities. A widespread view links youth unemployment and underachievement to insurgency and criminal activity.

Failure to address the entirety of the situation has recently been suggested by a Civil Society Organisation (CSO) service manager active in Belfast, as the 'biggest threat to our current political stability'. Moreover, the inability of both educational and social policy initiatives to improve the situation in any meaningful way has raised important questions concerning how problems can be tackled more effectively.

'This is the bureaucracy of Northern Ireland', stated a youth worker active in a loyalist area of Derry (where recent riots started). ‘We have different policies for everything, and different ways of working. Our politicians do not run the country: the civil service does.

From Radio 1's This Week, commentators Brian Feeney and Alex Kane on what Northern Ireland is facing in the summer ahead.

The only people who try to address youth problems are based in the voluntary sector and there is a need to move away from explaining Northern Ireland violence as only the result of Brexit. We should focus on the social hierarchy model upon which unionism has been built, where there are those to rule and those to be ruled.’

Siege mentality

Historically, the onset of industrialisation in Ulster had raised the spectre of class divisions and, as such, there was a need to put in place new mechanisms for maintaining Protestant unity in the face of the rising ‘Catholic threat’. This fear encouraged unionism to reinforce its hegemony.

Membership of organisations such as the Orange Order brought the community to further isolation: the Order soon became an important tool in helping to inculcate a 'Protestant' narrative of Irish history, which emphasised the ‘loyalty’ of its people as defined by their continued acceptance of a social order that had enabled Britain, and Ulster, to become an Empire race.

This was achieved, in the main, by emphasising the role played by the established political, social and religious leaderships in protecting ‘Protestant’ interests against a nascent and militant Catholicism.

From RTÉ Radio 1's This Week, Vincent Kearney on how the pandemic drastically changed the Orange Order's Twelfth of July celebrations in 2020

Educational reforms?

Inequalities appeared as the result of institutionalised routines and Unionist’s hegemony needed to be harnessed through institutions in order to manage the conduct of the population.

Hence, state institutions became central to the creation of normative behaviour, with schools becoming important instruments of social control. Subsequently, educational reforms aimed at making secondary schools accessible to all and not a privilege of a small elite, only partially succeeded in producing more meritocracy.

Catholic working classes have benefitted more significantly from such reforms than their Protestant counterparts, and this is because employment opportunities for Protestants from manual backgrounds were better than those of Catholics.

From Radio 1's Morning Ireland, John Hume's speech to the European Parliament after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998

As such, higher education was seen as a major route for potential social mobility for Catholics. Large sections of the Catholic community desired to bring about social and economic change in the face of both real and perceived discriminatory practices on the part of the unionist government.

This was very evident, for example, in the early writings of John Hume, who was hugely critical of politics and politicians for failing to provide constructive leadership and who called for collective, non-political action in order to address the real issues facing the population.

No equivalent emphasis was placed on education within Protestant working-class communities, even when traditional industries started to decline. This contributed to a significant long-term undervaluing of educational achievement as a mean for social mobility. As highlighted by a youth worker active in one of the most deprived loyalist areas of Belfast:

‘To me, the main reason why the children underachieve is the complete lack of aspirations from when the child is born right up through…’

To further aggravate this context, despite the existence of evidence concerning a historical detachment from education, there has been a failure on the part of unionist politicians to address the situation meaningfully, which raises questions about the desire of unionist politics to bring about a change.

Stopping the violence

While there are no clear indications that the recent unrest is being orchestrated by an organised group, the violence has been concentrated in areas where criminal gangs linked to loyalist paramilitaries have significant influence. Most of the rioters are young people, with some participants as young as 12, according to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). 'I sincerely doubt that some of those young rioters have read the Protocol or have any understanding of Brexit' commented the same youth worker mentioned above.

‘To stop the violence means to tackle social issues from the bottom up’ and this type of work is undertaken by CSOs in the whole of Northern Ireland: youth workers, volunteers, project coordinators and even former political prisoners, who have been the glue holding Northern Ireland together. They are not simply trying to take young people off the streets, but, through their work, they are peacefully challenging an out-of-date system based on a hegemony concept that has not been able to conform to modern times.

From Radio 1's News At One, recent rioting has been fueled by 'criminal exploitation' of 'at risk' teenagers according to Northern Ireland's Commissioner for Children and Young People, Koulla Yiasouma.

A significant legacy of this is evident in the negative impact this viewpoint has had on Protestant working classes’ education and their consequent social mobility. Unionism used the religious and sectarian divisions to shore up its political base and to advance a conservative form of politics that espoused a ‘natural’ social order. In doing so, they successfully created a cultural outlook based on the principle that education was for some and not for others.

The issue, and its social consequences, need to be addressed with greater determination on the part of unionist leaders to bring about change and (maybe) softer the violence. However, this can only happen when politics will be ready to recognise that history helped to create a significant cultural deficit and that unionism needs to change its fundamental meaning in a post-Brexit era.

Dr Giada Laganá is a Research Assistant at the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data at Cardiff University. She is the author of The European Union and the Northern Ireland Peace Process (Palgrave McMillan)

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ

Unemployment and underachievement

Siege mentality

Educational reforms?

Stopping the violence

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