Belfast Is On Fire Again

 Belfast is on fire again. Belfast is often on fire. It rains a lot, but it's also always ablaze, explaining the blanched complexions of its people: the smoked eyes, the skin, pale as a fish's belly. The people here are very wan in their natural state. Milk pale. The faded blue-green of their tattoos like chives in sour cream. The Belfast people sound delicious, prepped for the barbeque. And they are. They're rubbing two sticks together. Making sparks fly. 

This is the bus that goes to my house. I've been on this bus. 

Belfast is on fire again. Every summer smoulders. The bonefires, always bonefires, will make effigies of Muslims dance among the flames. Or Sikhs, because who can tell the difference? There are white foreigners too. Sneaky ones, who don't carry their I.D. etched in melanin. Catholics, first. The first foreigners, ahead of all the others, the ones at our door, and up to our knees, threatening to flood us, to extinguish our flame. But other othered too. Eastern Europeans. They have their special shops. They care for our elderly. All the hallmarks of the outsider, the stranger. Who would want to care for the elderly? Dirty bastards. 

A black man stabbed a white man in the street and Belfast is on fire again. It was a horrific crime. Someone filmed it and it spread like wildfire. Who films a stabbing? People. People get stabbed here all the time. Usually women, usually by their partners or ex-partners. Happens all the time. And people say, "This has to stop" and it doesn't stop. A quarter of the men arrested after 2024's race riots had been convicted on domestic abuse charges, and I doubt much has changed for this year's race riots. But if a black man stabs a white man, that's useful. There's a whole group of people who can use that for their political ends, who can ride roughshod again and again over the wishes of the victim's family, who can fan the flames of violence to further a specifically racist agenda. And that's what they've done here. Once again, giant gangs of men in masks and black sportwear are free to destroy bits of the city, to terrorise people, to close down businesses and schools, to drag people from their houses, and Stormont, wringing its hands, asks them, very nicely, if they'd like to stop. 

They take it under consideration. Maybe later. 

Belfast is on fire again and everybody knew it would happen. Everybody. It was singing in the wires. The plumber came round to look at the boiler yesterday, and said he was knocking off early as trouble was brewing. Susan received texts from her friends and work colleagues warning her. Local politicians formed a united front pleading for calm. That was when I knew it was going to be bad. It's almost as if those pleas fell on deaf ears, as if the boys in the black baseball caps, lining up to dance on top of the police vans, weren't taking their cues from local politicians, big eared farm boys with dirty finger nails, but from the glamorous international likes of Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and the resistible rise of Elon Musk. I think they were as pleased at finding out that Elon Musk had heard of Belfast as the time they found out Boney M had heard of Belfast. 

It's racist here because there are no people of colour at all. Where I was growing up, the town was ringed with charming little villages peopled with eye-popping xenophobes, the sort who would fly the Union flag in a cottage garden from a thirty foot flagpole. There were no black people anywhere so the othering could be allowed to grow, to bloom. There were no ordinary, pleasant black people around to cloud judgement. People of colour make up 3% of the population in Northern Ireland. Belfast gleams white like snow on a rope. We are pale motherfuckers. Traditionally, that didn't matter because lumps could be knocked out of people who looked just like you - unless you go along with the sort of specious phrenology that means you can tell "themmuns" by "the eyes" - along sectarian lines. But they're being told that people with darker skins are the problem, and they're starting to put away their differences to face a common enemy. I never thought the ultimate cause of a united Ireland would be a shared enthusiasm for racism. But who knows? 

A lot of the worst violence - the burnt out buses, the poor people dragged from their homes - happened on my road. Happily for me, my road is very long and it mainly happened three miles away. But I could walk in a straight line for forty five minutes and be on fire. I'm not going to. The buses are stopping at five. A lot of businesses are closed. Pubs too. Schools have been closed since this morning. So I can assume there'll be at least another night of this. It's even stopped raining. We'll see what's left by morning. There are some really nice bits of Northern Ireland, but you never see them on the news, and it's a good job. They'd be on fire.