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 young people in a Loyalist bag of Derry / Londonderry dropped a petrol bomb on the police officers who were trying to break up their gathering.
The riots spread to four other towns and cities in Northern Ireland and reached fever level in the west of Belfast last Wednesday, when about 600 people from neighboring loyalists 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 problems.
At the heart of the riots are young people – some as young as 12 – who, although born after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, are being held hostage by the identity politics that defined that era and which are still present.
“Young people have always been used as pawns for some of the sinister forces in our society,” Pastor Stephen Reynolds, chairman of the Conway Youth Center, told CNN.
“We would like to say that they are used to the dirty work of the boys who do not want to be caught doing it.”
This was shown in videos posted on social media last week, in which adults can be seen encouraging young people who bombed and hijacked a double-decker bus in Belfast’s Shankill Road.
‘They will be told that it is a matter of … a loss of their identity through the Irish Sea border, through the two-tier policing system that many people in the community talk about in relation to the [IRA’s] Bobby Storey’s funeral, and that kind of tension, ‘Reynolds said.
“But whether the young people on the street in this riot understand the implications of the issues, I do not know.”
The pastor said that older generations still pass on stories of the problems to their children, which he says is one of the reasons why “we still have the problems we face today.” But he stressed that the “majority … do not want to see us go back to a time when things were really bad.”
The sectarian violence of the problems, between 1968 and 1998, killed more than 3,500 people.
Rebecca Dickson, a 22-year-old youth worker at the Conway Youth Center, said the rioters do not define the community at large and that she and her contemporaries are eager to move beyond the labels of the past.
‘We’re at a stage where we do not care what you look like, we do not care what you represent. “If you are good with us, we will be good with you again,” she said. “It was just completely blown out of proportion.”
“These are kids who do not really know what’s going on,” Dickson added. “The protesters are not sitting at night reading the Brexit rules.”
“They only do it for anger and the anger of other people, I think too … they heard things or saw them on the news and took them and used them to incite their violence,” she said.
Leaders have exploited the fears and used a legacy of violence to do so, experts say.
A project ‘built on sand’
Politicians tell communities that their identity is being threatened and that their sense of ‘British’ is being defended, said Jonny Byrne, a senior lecturer in criminology at Ulster University.
This, exacerbated by the stress of the pandemic, has resulted in the disorder seen over the past few weeks, Byrne said. His research focuses on paramilitary violence, young people’s participation in political violence and the community’s experiences of public order policing in Northern Ireland.
He explained that although the Good Friday Agreement ended the armed conflict, it did not change the way people existed there.
“We never have the fundamental building blocks of how we can create a new society where people – Catholics and Protestants – can live together, or how you can create a society where we can talk about what happened from 1969 to 1998, we have never mastered. ” Byrne told CNN.
The peace project is ‘so fragile, it’s built on sand’, he added, explaining that it is not mature enough or embedded enough in society to put pressure on Brexit, the Northern Ireland Protocol or a global pandemic present, to deal with.
“So when [pressures] ‘it manifests itself … it comes back to the traditional format of Orange versus Green, Catholic versus Protestant, Republican versus Loyalist, and it inevitably ends in violence on the street and with police officers being injured,’ ‘he said.
Byrne noted that, perhaps not surprisingly, the areas where recent violence has erupted are those disproportionately affected by the conflict.
Systemic problems
Green Party Councilor Brian Smyth, who represents the Belfast area of Lisnasharragh, told CNN that the trauma of the past has been passed down through generations; without conflict transformation or a conciliation commission, the same matters remain.
“So many people on both sides of the community feel they have been let down, they have been ignored,” he said, noting that more people have taken their own lives in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement than they have in killed violence. during the problems.
And education and social housing remain a concern for underprivileged communities, with youth services struggling due to austerity.
‘Where is our commitment to give them [the youth] hope? he said.
In the 2015 report ‘Inequality and segregation in schools in Northern Ireland’, researchers Vani Borooah and Colin Knox found that 21% of those aged 30 to 34 did not complete post-primary education – the highest percentage in the United States Kingdom.
Collectively, government-funded secondary schools in Northern Ireland do not meet the minimum acceptable standard for post-primary schools in England, “with only 33% of Protestant grammar schools meeting the standard, compared to 41% of Catholic grammar schools. Protestant schoolboys generally fare the worst of all groups.
It is in this environment that young people are ‘being exploited by others’, Smyth said.
“There’s been a lot of rhetoric … the last six months, especially around Brexit, and everyone has been pushing it – comfortable old men are stirring the pot and sitting in their pretty houses living in their gardens. But the children on the ground are angry , disillusioned, voiceless … [they are the ones] which will also deal with its impact. ‘
“Division, division, division keeps some people wealthy and comfortable,” he added.
This past weekend, according to police, there was a lull in street violence, with only ‘minor problems’ after loyalist groups turned off parades and protests following the death of Prince Philip on Friday.
The silence held on Saturday – the anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.
But political leaders fear violence may return after Philip’s funeral next weekend.
“We have a history in Northern Ireland where people can turn on violence and turn off violence like a tap,” Byrne said.
Smyth questions just what the violence will take to stop.
“If a child dies? If a police officer dies or a bus driver is attacked? Maybe it’s uncomfortable for people, I think we should have this conversation,” he said.
“If we are not careful in our language, we get corpses.”
CNN’s Salma Abdelaziz and Florence Davey-Attlee contributed to this report.