For the past ten years, I’ve made my home in Cloughfern on the outskirts of the Northern Irish capital. Ten minutes’ walk one way, and you’re in Monkstown Wood, a nature reserve replete with birds, squirrels and a close community of dog walkers. Twenty minutes another way and you’re at Hazelbank Park on the shores of Belfast Lough, where the view takes in the iconic yellow Harland and Wolff cranes, and sweeps all the way north to the lighthouse at Whitehead.
But the scenes broadcast from the end of my street on Tuesday night, of masked rioters, petrol bombs and car hijackings, provoke revulsion. Far-right agitators such as Tommy Robinson and Reform leader Nigel Farage responded to a knife attack by a man believed to be an asylum seeker with dog-whistles, including calls to riot – pouring fuel on a fire that's been smouldering for weeks now.
People in Northern Ireland have muscle memory of violence, murder and riots in our not-very-distant past. We also have muscle memory on how to organise and help each other through.
