Notes on Attending a Riot: Northern Ireland in 2015 and 2021
By Laura Brady (Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the Buffalo VA’s Center for Integrated Healthcare)
The following is an experimental multimodal piece conceived as a companion to the article “Past Violence and Present Belonging in Belfast: Two Sisters Remember their Childhood Experiences with Paramilitary Violence on Shankill Road” in Anthropology & Humanism. Prompted by the violence that erupted briefly in Northern Ireland in April 2021 (after my article was submitted for publication), I interweave photographs, descriptions, and fieldnote excerpts from my 2015 research in Belfast with public tweets by people responding to the 2021 riots. The resulting piece is a patchwork glimpse into the complexity of violence and the challenges of peacemaking in contemporary Northern Ireland.
News reports of the recent disturbances in Northern Ireland—usually termed “riots,” though they are often contained within a small area and involve only a dozen or so young people—pointed out that this was the first time in six years that the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) had used their water-cannon vehicles.
It has also been six years since I was last in Belfast, and, I wondered, had I then seen one of the last uses of the cannon? I had planned to watch the 2015 Anti-Internment parade after seeing so many Orange Order parades, but it was cancelled at the last minute after a dispute over the starting time between the organizers and the Parades Commission.[1] When a colleague and I heard from the people we were chatting with that the parade had been cancelled (one of the two older men, who were also waiting for the parade to start, received a phone call that the parade was off), we decided to walk up to what had been the starting point. My master’s thesis had focused on the narrative framings that regional media employed to report on protests and riots around Orange Order parade routes in Belfast, and my colleague planned to study protests and riots among Belfast working-class Catholics. So, we were both interested in observing what might happen next.
As people along the parade route started getting the news and wandered back home, there was no anger, no frustration. One father, out with his young daughter and their dog, joked, “Well, that’s my afternoon ruined.” Then we reached Rosapenna, where police had blocked both ends. It was calm at first, as we stood on Oldpark Road behind the police line at the intersection with Rosapenna Street.
PSNI Land Rovers line the street near Rosapenna on August 9, 2015. (Photograph by author)
Later that night, I wrote in my field diary:
Police had rosapenna blocked and were very active, getting out shields and standing ready in riot gear. It looked like the road down into town was blocked, too. The police said yes, we couldn’t go that way, just the way we’d come. Then as we were mid-sentence, rocks started coming over the landrover line and the police went into action, calling for the wall to form up via their shields. We backed off, then went across the street where the press were watching. More rocks, bits of stone and brick, bottles. The 001 and 002 numbered water cannon trucks showed up and the first maneuvered into position.
Then I could see over the landrovers to the small crowd on the other side. I saw a few adult men standing just to the right, close to the police line, with a few other adults standing in their front gardens watching, and what looked like mostly young people in a crowd up front filling the front of the street, throwing stuff. Not too many, and all contained at (I think) this end of the street. The one street, in all of Belfast, it seemed…
Various things being thrown, the water cannon replacing each other to refill. Police standing ready, more moving into place. Press all around them, trying to get pictures of the action. It was clearly a practiced ballet, there was never a point I saw where police had to tell reporters to get out of the way. Even when landrovers were being backed up and later the water cannon exchanging places. And of course there were the [photographers] with helmets on, who clearly knew what to expect….
While I was standing around taking pictures and video, I spoke to a man from Dublin. He had come up for the parade…. I told him I was a student, studying the peace process. He said, “What peace process? There isn’t a peace process. It failed.”
Graffiti near Queen’s University, Belfast, in September 2015. (Photograph by author)
Northern Ireland is on the periphery of both the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, though it is a part of the United Kingdom. During the Troubles, the Northern Irish border with Ireland was a conflict zone. Rural borderlands, such as South Armagh, were peppered with paramilitary hideouts and strongholds, the majority of them Irish Republican Army (IRA). This enabled ambushes and the smuggling of people, money, and firepower across the border. South Armagh was so difficult to police, it was nicknamed “bandit country.” There, the British army heavily fortified the border with watchtowers, helicopters, and military checkpoints.
An IRA sign in Armagh City, August 2012. (Photograph by author)
A key tenet of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), or Belfast Agreement, was the dismantling of these fortifications and the right to freedom of movement between Northern Ireland and Ireland. After the UK decision to leave the European Union (EU), the open border became a point of contention, as Ireland remains a member of the EU. All parties agreed that the GFA needed to be preserved, but there was little agreement on how to keep an open border while doing customs checks, leading to debates over “hard” and “soft” borders and the Irish Backstop, which would have kept the UK in a customs union with the EU until a solution was found.
Current implementation has set the customs boundary in the Irish Sea, between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. Unionists and Loyalists of the Protestant community are unhappy with this solution, as it keeps Northern Ireland in a customs union with Ireland (and the EU). Much of the discussions of the late March/early April 2021 riots in Belfast and other Northern Irish cities have focused on this as a cause.
Another explanation for the April 2021 riots, including from First Minister Arlene Foster (of the Democratic Unionist Party), has been the appearance of leniency on prominent Sinn Féin politicians who broke COVID regulations to attend a funeral.
Others found fault with her pointing to Sinn Féin and the Catholic community when the majority of riots were in working-class Protestant areas.
People also pointed to underlying conditions, such as continued paramilitary presence and high unemployment in working-class estates, paralleling some of Angie’s and Ellie’s discussions of Shankill Road (see my article in Anthropology and Humanism).
Others summed up the complex combination of potential factors leading up to the riots.
Ellie mentioned the hate for police in her neighborhood of Shankill Road. “Catholics thought we loved the police, but we hated them. Start a riot just to get the peelers in, then attack them. Both sides did it.” (For more on youth riots in Belfast, see Neil Jarman and Chris O’Halloran’s [2001] article and Madeline Leonard’s [2010] article on recreational rioting.)
Describing the small riot in August 2015, I wrote:
There was a woman who lived above the corner shop, who watched for a while in silence from her window, then started shouting at the police standing just below her. [My colleague] was closer, in with the photographers wearing helmets, he said it sounded mostly like “get the fuck out of here, what the fuck are you doing.” Just as she was finishing shouting, the first petrol bombs were thrown at the water cannon truck…
It and the next couple hit near the water cannon, and were immediately doused. A few more flew, I even got a couple on video. But none that I noticed came over the police line, while many of the bits they’d been throwing just before from the roof had been coming well over. There was what looked like a bouncy ball that came down way over by us, bounced, and kept going over the wall behind us into the empty lot!
The remains of a paramilitary mural near Sandy Row, Belfast, 2015. (Photograph by author)
In the first days of the 2021 riots, there was a sense that no one was listening, as there was little initial news coverage or comment from the British government in London.
People near areas with disturbances documented what was happening on Twitter, reminding me of how Ellie and Angie spoke in 2015 about rioting when they were adolescents.
“There was rioting outside one night, and all the bars had locked doors and the shutters were down. It was an eerie quiet, really scary. There was a car burnt out in the middle of the road. And you could hear rioting down the way, but Shankill was empty. It was the stillness—I remember saying to [Angie], ‘we shouldn’t be out.’ It was scary.”—Ellie
“Normally, there would have been riots and all, every year there would have been riots after, with the police. Our riots came when they were trying to get through the Catholic area.”—Angie
But people also found humor in the situation.
Some wanted to convey that Northern Ireland is not just a place with sectarian violence. While others called for peace.
On the local news that night in 2015, the Rosapenna blockade made the news but only for about five minutes. They focused on the city-center shops being closed for two hours while the police decided what to do about the parade.
Graffiti during Culture Night, Belfast, 2015. (Photograph by author)
NOTE
[1] Parades that commemorate narratives of the past specific to one of the two majority communities in Northern Ireland can be controversial, particularly if the parade route includes interface areas used by members of both majority communities or passes through neighborhoods where residents largely identify with the other community. Protests—and, sometimes, rioting—can occur. Orange Order parades are heavily linked to the Protestant Unionist Loyalist community, whose members largely identify as British, and commemorate a narrative of victories and sacrifices in which Catholics are often the enemy. The Anti-Internment parade is linked to the Catholic Nationalist Republican community, whose members largely identify as Irish, and recalls the British government and military’s strategy of targeted mass arrests and internment of Catholic men during the late twentieth-century conflict known as the Troubles.
Laura Brady, née LeVon, is a cultural anthropologist and health services researcher focused on the intersections of disparity, age, and conflict—from the impacts of childhood violence on Northern Irish young adults to the relationship between student veterans’ military service and substance use in Western New York. Her current research centers on increasing access to screenings and screening rates for breast and colorectal cancers among minority and low-income communities in Western New York. She is an HRI Scientist at Roswell Park Cancer Institute and an affiliate of the Buffalo VA’s Center for Integrated Healthcare.