Don’t ask who struck the match. Ask who built the pyre. Ask who let poverty, illiteracy and alienation so corrode Loyalist communities across Northern Ireland that their boys tear at the seams of their own community so they can wave the shreds as flags.
Try to imagine being a teenager in a community whose entire identity is built on loyalty to British institutions that barely know you exist, which do nothing to ensure you have anything to look forward to.
The UK was a business arrangement. The famous loyalty to Britain in Protestant communities in Northern Ireland was forged in metal workshops of the shipyards of East Belfast in the 19th century. Looking across the Irish Sea to its ship-building siblings – Glasgow and Liverpool – the Unionist community played its part in conquering the British Empire, and the jobs doing so soldered their sentiment.
