Loyalists want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, while nationalists would like to see Northern Ireland become part of the Republic of Ireland.
The first few nights of violence began after young people in a loyal pocket in Derry / Londonderry dropped a petrol bomb on police officers who had tried to break up their assembly.
The riots spread to four other cities in Northern Ireland, reaching fever in west Belfast on Wednesday, when about 600 people from neighboring loyalist and nationalist communities clashed along a so-called peace wall. 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 marked the end of a period of violent conflict known as the Problems.
At the heart of the riots are young people – some up to 12 years old – who, despite being born after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, are being held hostage by the identity policy that defined that era and continues to frame today. .
Young people have always been used as pawns for some of the sinister forces in our society, “Pastor Stephen Reynolds, president of the Conway Youth Center, told CNN.
“We like to say that they are used to doing the dirty work of boys who don’t want to be caught doing that.”
This was demonstrated in the videos broadcast on social networks last week, in which adults could be seen applauding young people who bombed with petrol and hijacked a double-decker bus on Shankill Road in Belfast.
“They will be told that it is for a cause … a loss of their identity across the Irish Sea, through the two-tier police system that many people talk about in the community about [IRA’s] Bobby Storey’s funeral and that kind of tension, “Reynolds said.
“But if the young people on the street in this riot understand the depths of these issues, I’m not sure.”
The pastor said that older generations are still telling the stories of their children’s problems, which he said is one of the reasons why “we still have the troubles we face today.” He stressed, however, that “most … do not want to see us return at a time when things were very bad.”
The sectarian violence of the Problems, between 1968 and 1998, left more than 3,500 people dead.
Rebecca Dickson, a 22-year-old worker at the Conway Youth Center, said the outrages did not define the community at large and that she and her contemporaries were eager to go beyond the labels of the past.
“We are in the stage where now we do not care how you are, we do not care what you represent, if you are nice to us, we will fall in love,” she said. “It was just blown completely disproportionately.”
“Kids don’t really know what’s going on,” Dickson added. “Protesters do not spend the night reading Brexit rules.”
“I just do this for the anger and rage of other people, I think … they heard things or saw on the news and they took them and used them to fuel their violence,” she said.
Leaders have exploited these fears, using a legacy of violence to do so, experts say.
A project “built on sand”
Politicians tell communities that their identities are threatened and that their sense of “Britishness” is eroded, said Jonny Byrne, a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Ulster.
This, exacerbated by the stress of the pandemic, culminated in the turmoil of recent weeks, said Byrne, whose research focuses on paramilitary violence, youth participation in political violence and community experiences of public order in Northern Ireland.
He explained that although the Good Friday Agreement ended the armed conflict, it did not change the way people there coexist.
“We have never been able to deal with the fundamentals of how to create a new society in which people – Catholics and Protestants – can live together or how to create a society in which we can talk about what has happened since 1969. until 1998, “Byrne told CNN.
The peace project is “so fragile, it is built on sand,” he added, explaining that it is neither mature enough nor sufficiently embedded in society to cope with the pressures of Brexit, Ireland’s protocol. North or a global pandemic.
“It simply came to our notice then [pressures] it manifests itself … it returns to the traditional format of orange versus green, catholic versus protestant, republican versus loyalist and inevitably ends in violence on the streets and with injured police officers, “he said.
Byrne noted that, perhaps 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 the transformation of the conflict or a reconciliation commission, the same problems remain.
“So many people on both sides of the community feel abandoned, ignored,” he said, noting that more people took their lives in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement than were killed in violence during troubles.
Education and social housing also remain a matter of concern for disadvantaged communities, with youth services bearing the brunt of cuts due to austerity.
“Where is our commitment to offer them [the youth] hope? “, he said.
In the 2015 paper, “Inequality and Segregation in Schools in Northern Ireland,” researchers Vani Borooah and Colin Knox found that 21% of children between the ages of 30 and 34 did not complete post-primary education – the highest rate From Great Britain.
Collectively, government-funded secondary schools in Northern Ireland do not meet the minimum acceptable standard for post-primary schools in England, “only 33% of Protestant high schools reach that standard, compared to 41% of Catholic high schools, the report shows. Protestant schoolchildren are the worst of all groups.
In this environment, young people are “exploited by others,” Smyth said.
“There has been a lot of rhetoric … in the last six months, especially around Brexit, and everyone is raising it – comfortable old people shaking the pot, sitting in their beautiful houses living in their gardens. But the children on earth are angry, disillusioned, without copyright … [they are the ones] which will also have to do with its impact. ”
“Division, division, division, keeps some people well and comfortable,” he added.
Last weekend saw a break in street violence, with only “minor problems”, according to police, after loyalist groups canceled parades and protests after the death of Prince Philip on Friday.
That silence held on Saturday – the anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement.
But political leaders fear violence could return after Philip’s funeral next weekend.
“We have a history in Northern Ireland where people can turn violence on and off like a tap,” Byrne said.
Smyth doubts what it will take for the violence to stop.
“When a child dies? When a police officer dies or a bus driver is attacked? Maybe this is inconvenient for people, I think we need to have this conversation,” he said.
“If we are not careful in our language, we end up with corpses.”
CNN’s Salma Abdelaziz and Florence Davey-Attlee contributed to the report.