Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

In yesterday's Belfast Telegraph I asked whether the current debate in Great Britain includes lessons for a region just starting out on its experience of racial diversity.  Pop over to the BT to read the full article . In Northern Ireland, we're late-starters on the politics of race. That could actually be an advantage. There's an opportunity to learn from experiences elsewhere.   If we get it right, we can enjoy the cultural richness diversity brings, while also making newer arrivals feel integrated and at home.   To date, we've had few high-profile racist incidents in Northern Ireland. Only the attacks on Roma during the summer of 2009 were serious enough to command attention outside the province.   There's no indication that casual racism, or occasional outbursts of violence, are set to harden into a mood for far-right politics any time soon.   If the BNP decides to field council candidates in Northern Ireland, it's likely to get short shrift.   For th...

I observed only yesterday that Peter Robinson shares with Irish nationalist counterparts the habit of describing unionism, and nationalism for that matter, as a ‘community’, defined by common religion and a certain prescriptive view of culture. The Irish News’ resident hate monger, Brian Feeney, also uses the word ‘unionism’ to denote a perceived ‘community’, which allows him to confer collective responsibility for any act which he deems to have been perpetrated by a ‘unionist’ upon a broad swathe of society, whilst simultaneously distancing another section of society, to which Brian believes himself to belong, from any share of blame. Given that Feeney’s venom is almost exclusively targeted towards ‘unionists’, by his definition, he holds in contempt a mass of people who form the majority of the population of Northern Ireland. Thus, after stumbling upon an idea which makes some sense , i.e. that attacks on Romanian homes are the mirror image of ‘republican’ riots in mid Ulster and “...

In stark contrast to the sweeping hyperbole which filled opinion pages in the weekend newspapers, O’Neill has written an intelligent commentary of issues surrounding immigration to Britain from central and eastern Europe, prompted by attacks on properties housing immigrants in Belfast and a subsequent exodus of Romanian families from their homes. In particular he examines the plight of Roma, many of whom have suffered institutional prejudice, rights abuses and violence in their home countries, before being subjected to wanton thuggery by youths in South Belfast. O’Neill highlights two issues which are particularly pertinent to the case of Romanian Roma. First, countries from previously communist parts of Europe have been admitted to the EU without sufficient scrutiny of their legal treatment of minorities. Certainly this has partly been influenced by good will and good faith on the part of longer standing EU members. There was (and remains to a degree) widespread sympathy for neig...

Neo-Nazism has frequently provided gritty material for film-makers. Russell Crowe starred in ‘Romper Stomper’, an Australian take on the subject matter. ‘American History X’ cast Ed Norton as a bright young man who embraced violent racism before undergoing a transformation in prison and returning to his community full of remorse. Shane Meadows’ ‘This is England’ explored the interaction of fascist politics and youth subcultures in Thatcher’s Britain. Social turmoil in post-Soviet Russia has contributed to its unenviable reputation as a hotbed of racism and extreme nationalism. Albeit that the febrile political scene has calmed down a little since the 1990s. A figure like Eduard Limonov is now known primarily as an accomplice of Garry Kasparov in opposing Putin’s government. But the eccentric writer’s ‘National Bolshevik’ grouping blends racialist theory with Stalinist nostalgia and Eurasianism in a potent red-brown mix. Limonov’s periods in prison are frequently presented...

Even the most fanciful commentator would struggle to describe Northern Ireland as a well integrated society. Indeed the political dispensation which provides our regional government is based on community carve-up and neither of the two largest parties is prepared to weaken their grip on respective fiefdoms by pursuing an agenda of ‘sharing’. From the top down, there is an assumption that inclusive housing or education entails unpalatable compromises which cannot help but dilute the ‘cultures’ which are being integrated. Given the fetish for a particular view of community which our politicians indulge, why then should we be surprised when newly arrived additions to Northern Ireland’s society are not integrated seamlessly or welcomed generously? In South Belfast a particularly abhorrent attack took place last week which seems to have been racist, or at least xenophobic, in motivation. A group of aggressive, and apparently drunk, young men forced their way into a house in which four ...

I have mentioned before the preposterous, gratuitously controversial nonsense propounded by ‘revolutionary unionist’ Dr (!?) John Coulter. This supposed political commentator writes outrageous enough articles for the Blanket, nominally a political journal, but his most florid output is disseminated through that organ of intellectual discourse, the Irish Daily Star. Normally I would not get too exercised about journalism in such a newspaper, but Coulter’s latest column was on Newshound today and I believe it is an outrageously sensationalist and indeed inflammatory treatment of a serious subject. The article purports to deal with racism in Northern Ireland, an issue which has arisen after xenophobic attacks on Lithuanian immigrants in Cookstown. Instead of analysing seriously the causes and effects of these attacks and deducing what might be done to prevent them, we have a febrile evocation of the BNP winning the forthcoming London Assembly election, boatloads of jackbooted fascis...