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Belfast Telegraph Home > News

Riots and the poverty factor

By Eamonn McCann
featureseditor@belfasttelegraph.co.uk

15 September 2005

But it wasn't poverty they were rioting about, David Dunseith expostulated on Tuesday, heroically managing, as ever, to choke back the volcanic frustration rising within him at the sheer irrationality of the back-chattering horde.

He was responding to calls following an interview with Frances Dowds of the Anti-Poverty Network, who had argued that economic deprivation was a major factor in the mayhem which had swept mainly Protestant areas since the weekend.

On the face of it, he was, of course, right. None of the many who have appeared on television or radio to defend the rioting or to explain it in a justifying way has suggested that anger at the widening gap between the rich and the poor had prompted the outbreak.

The violence didn't arise from the horizontal division in society but from the vertical division between the communities. Therefore, the remedy must lie in somehow recalibrating the balance between the communities.

On the other hand, I couldn't help noticing that one of the succession of extremely angry Orangemen who figured in television news footage carried a poster with the slogan Enough is Enough, which is also the slogan of a campaign just launched by Ms. Dowds' and a range of other voluntary organisations - co-ordinated by the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action - calling for a serious, relevant and properly-funded anti-poverty strategy.

Enough is Enough argues that tackling poverty is a necessary element in ending the conflict.

The Orangeman's use of the slogan was no more than coincidence, I imagine. But a coincidence worth pondering, too.

On Talkback, Ms Dowds made the time-honoured point that any map of the Troubles will show that it's the least well-off areas which have borne the brunt from the beginning. Moreover, she added, the intense rioting of recents days has been highly localised - in areas which all statistics show are currently among the most deprived in the north.

This suggests that, while fervour against poverty may not be the proximate cause of the violence, the violence wouldn't erupt were it not for the poverty.

Put it another way: why are there no gatherings on roof-tops in north Down lobbing petrol-bombs on to police vehicles below?

A young woman from the area where such scenes were enacted justified the riots on Tuesday's early evening news by saying that this was what "the other side" had done, and they got what they wanted.

And what was that, the interviewer wanted to know? "Justice, I suppose," she answered. "But we need justice now."

Taken at face value, her analysis combined an acknowledgement of historical injustice done to the Catholic community with an expression of injustice felt by her own community here and now.

It seemed to me more succinct and sensible and a more hopeful account of the reasons for the rioting than any I'd heard from political leaders. It was pitched as a demand for equality.

The feeling of many thousands of Protestant working-class people which she expressed, that they have been left behind by events, is a reflection not of sectarian begrudgery but of material reality.

The feeling is widely understood on "the other side." It is not uncommon in discussions and at meetings to do with anti-social behaviour, lack of amenities and the like in Catholic working-class areas to hear acknowledgement that, of course, it's as bad for Protestant people, too, these days.

While there are nationalists who took a slap-it-up-them attitude to the Protestant turmoil of recent days, as many or more have recognised, partly from their own experience, that such prolonged and furious communal aggression directly mainly against authority cannot be accounted for by reference only to political manipulation or the sinister manoeuvres of paramilitary gangs but must reflect deep-seated, really-felt grievance which has to be attended to.

On Monday night, at the Gasyard Centre in the Bogside, I attended a celebration of the life of Kevin O'Carroll, a key figure in Neighbourhood Renewal in Derry for many years.

Kevin died suddenly, unexpectedly, last week, aged only 54. The crowd which crammed into the main auditorium testified to the phenomenal respect and affection in which he had been held across the city. Among those who paid eloquent tribute was Willie Temple, from the beleagured Protestant Fountain estate.

Standing outside afterwards, as you do, talking to a couple of Bogside community activists, the talk turned, naturally, to the weekend events in Belfast and the way they so looked like scenes in the area around us in the not very distant past.

"You know," remarked one of my companions, "we're getting more like one another."

Putting serious political weight behind the NICVA campaign would be one way of helping enhance that aspect of our reality.

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