Why Molotovs flew between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods in Northern Ireland again

Thirty years of fighting, death and destruction do not seem to be enough in the land of unrest. Northern Ireland is on fire again and remembers those hooded boys throwing Molotov cocktails at soldiers protected by huge shields as if they were heroes of Marvell. Guerrilla warfare in a few blocks with 3,500 dead. Selective killings. Paramilitaries fueled by ideology and weapons that come from across the Atlantic. Bloody Sunday 1972, the massacre and Bono’s voice honoring the victims. IRA militiaman Bobby Sands died in prison after a terrible hunger strike that rocked everyone except the Iron Lady who could save him. And clear, Catholics against Protestants and vice versa, as if Martin Luther had risen.

Deja vu from 23 years ago when it was finally signed the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Feín, the political arm of the IRA, has become a figure heard all over the world by those who have managed to decipher his impossible North Irish accent. Another Friday, that of 2021, the previous week, turned everything upside down. Molotovs flew, buses burned and several heads were smashed, in particular those of the police officers who tried to arrest these boys who no longer seem as militant as they are violent. The Springfield Road area in West Belfast has been the scene of the most action. But the flying stone exhibit has spread throughout most of the city.

Wednesday night, the tragedy was lined. Protesters focused on the so-called peace lines between Unionist Shankill Road and Nationalist Springfield Road. The pitched battle lasted for hours. On the barricades, on both sides, there were as many militants as there were boys who wanted to imitate their parents and more than a gangster enjoying the confusion to settle accounts. The successive confinements due to the pandemic have contributed to the cocktail.

Pro-British Protestant trade unionists, who voted overwhelmingly in favor of Brexit, leaving the European Union in 2016, They are furious with the UK-EU deal creating what they see as an invisible border in the Irish Sea between the island of Great Britain and the island of Ireland, forcing customs controls on goods entering Northern Ireland from other regions from the United Kingdom. They fear that this border will become permanent, bringing them closer to a complete separation from Britain and a new minority status in a united Irish state.

Unionist discontent peaked last week after authorities’ decision not to act against various leaders of Sinn Féin, a former political arm of the now inactive Irish Republican Army (IRA) for attending a funeral in June last year despite restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Thousands of people accompanied the coffin of guerrilla veteran Bobby Storey through the streets of the Catholic neighborhoods of Belfast to Milltown Cemetery, where the heroes of the IRA are buried.

The London press has broadcast in recent hours evidence that high-ranking figures in pro-British Protestant organizations such as the Ulster Defense Association and the Ulster Voluntary Force they riot. In March, the Council of Loyalist Communities, which represents the three main Protestant paramilitary groups in the region, announced that he was temporarily withdrawing his support for the Good Friday deal due to doubts they had over the Brexit protocol.

While Brexit has certainly raised tensions, it does not tell the whole story. Boys born on the day the Good Friday Agreement was signed They will be 23 this Saturday. As he said to the trade magazine Foreign police Jonny Byrne, senior lecturer at the University of Ulster whose research focuses on the issue of youth involvement in political violence, Political leaders have not done enough over the past two decades to tackle the serious issues of segregation and identity that remained after the end of paramilitary violence.

Life in Northern Ireland, especially among the working class, remains deeply divided; 97% of social housing in Belfast is separated between Catholics and Protestants. Less than 8 percent of young people attend integrated schools. And in a 2019 poll, 58% of people aged 18 to 34 said they had very few or no friends on the other side of the sectarian divide. For Byrne, the years since the signing of the peace agreement have been wasted. “Ultimately, the Good Friday Accord gave us a roadmap for building a new society. Yes we haven’t built a new companyHe argues.

Here the political interests of the other protagonists appear. Despite the fact that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson no longer has to rely on the support of the Democratic Unionist Party, after the Tories’ landslide victory in the 2019 election, he still has reason to keep Downing Street in Northern Ireland. US President Joe Biden and parliamentary majority leader Nancy Pelosi have made upholding the Good Friday deal a key factor in any future US-UK trade deal.

On March 26, the European Commission assured that it expected “in the coming days” for the United Kingdom to present it. its action plan to implement the rules and requirements of the protocol for Ireland and Northern Ireland as part of the Brexit deal which have not yet been fully satisfied, Brussels has therefore opened a case in London. On Thursday, the Commission confirmed receipt of the document on March 31 and assured that it was analyzing it. Brussels and London are currently in technical contact, and the EU recalled that the Irish protocol was adopted to “protect peace and stability in Northern Ireland, protect the Good Friday peace agreement, protect cooperation between the North and South and avoid a hard border “. El 3 de marzo, de forma unilateral y sorpresiva, el gobierno británico anunció que, sin tener en cuenta lo pactado, el 1 de abril no aplicaría controles aduaneros y fronterizos a las mercancías desde Gran Bretaña con destino a la provincia británica de Irlanda del Norte and postpone them for six months, Until October 1st.

This cloudy climate is what rekindled the fuse of the Molotovs who fly through the main towns of northern Ireland. In the previous step it took 30 years and thousands of deaths and injuries to deactivate them.

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