Ben Lowry: It is an unproven slur on unionists to say they are more racist than nationalists
This has been a terrible week of violence in Northern Ireland, with wicked scenes of houses and vehicles burnt out.
It has also been a bad week for frankly discussing immigration and tensions that have been building in parts of the province.
And it has been a triumph for nationalists who slur unionists as more racist than them.
I have done barely any broadcasts on the trouble, because there has been other big news happening and I was not on ground as much as I was in previous disorder and did not feel as confident in reporting from the scene as other News Letter journalists.
I did however take part in an interview on Channel 4 News on Wednesday evening from Belfast city centre, in which Lilian Seenoi-Barr also took part from Londonderry, where she is director of Programmes at the North-West Migrants Forum and an SDLP politician. Lilian told a Westminster committee of MPs five years ago that racism is "incredibly high in unionist areas".
My argument is that it is no higher in unionist areas than in nationalist ones. There have been severe racial tensions, multiple anti-immigrant protests and even riots in the Republic of Ireland in recent years.
Another point that I made on C4 News was that immigrants were more likely to be put in loyalist areas in Belfast than in nationalist ones, for reasons that are not clear but are certainly related to the fact that there has long been more available housing in the former. Republican housing estates are bursting at the seams, whereas loyalist ones have long been declining. This has been the case for more than a quarter of a century.I was one of the first reporters on the scene in June 2001 when a dispute arose over men putting up a loyalist flag in the Protestant Upper Ardoyne, leading on to the long Holy Cross school protest. When in the following months trouble spread to the interface between nationalist Short Strand and unionist Cluan Place in east Belfast, I was present almost nightly. Back then the Protestant demographic decline was obvious – in Madrid Street for example, which runs between the Short Strand and Templemore Avenue, the Protestant end was mostly empty and derelict, the nationalist end fully occupied. There is not room here to go into that violence – suffice to say that it got ugly. Since then, Madrid Street has been blocked between the republican and loyalist ends.
No-one disputes demographic change in Northern Ireland, even if we disagree the pace of it. After all, don’t republicans taunt unionists about it? Tick-tock and so on.
I often point out that Protestants were far earlier into secularism than Catholics (weekly church attendance was under 50% among main Protestant faiths as far back as 1968, whereas Catholic such attendance was 95%). Protestants were far faster to move away from schools that had a church ethos. But whatever the complex reasons for the differentials in housing pressure in divided working-class parts of Belfast, it is a reality.
There is thus a benign reason – space – for more immigrants being put into loyalist areas. There is also a feeling in places like the Shankill that the authorities are also engaging in a degree to social engineering, by placing immigrants into loyalist areas to dilute and undermine them. The relevance now is the perception of that, even if unproven.
Yet when Clive Myrie on the BBC Six O’Clock news on Thursday went to loyalist areas, which are supposedly more racist, and the Short Strand, which is allegedly more welcoming, this disparity in allocation of immigrants was not mentioned.
On Chanel 4 News, when Lilian Seenoi-Barr was scathing about loyalists and at one point accused me of “not being entirely honest” in challenging the link between unionists and racism, I tried to explain some of these tensions about housing.
Watching the broadcast was the University of Ulster professor and outspoken commentator Deidre Heenan, who weighed in. In a message on the social media platform X, she quoted this excerpt from the interview, in which I said: "There's a determination to depict unionists and loyalists as more racist than anyone else – that's entirely wrong."
The C4 News presenter Jackie Long: "But most of the chaos of last night was in loyalist areas wasn't it?"
I replied: "Yes, it was ...”
Prof Heenan then put a emoji in her message showing a puzzled face. She included a carefully edited clip of the interview that ended just before I began to explain why what I was saying was consistent – as I did over the next five minutes, also referring to anti immigrant feeling in the Republic.
Her mocking and misleading message got 200,000 views and almost 2,000 likes. The clear implication was that I was making a muddled point. Yesterday afternoon, I replied to Deidre Heenan on X by pointing out that she hadn’t tagged me in her message which would have alerted me to her criticisms. I then asked:
“Why have you posted a carefully edited clip that has the effect of distorting my point, ending before I explain myself? The emoji implies I was inconsistent. And what are you saying? That unionists are more racist than nationalists? If so, why not actually say it, just as I went on TV to argue the contrary? It is a self-serving nationalist myth.”
She had not replied as this column went to press last night.
We know that loyalist areas are concerned about the pace of change in often poor communities, including at times the arrival across Britain of what Jim Allister called an “alien culture”, and we know such concerns are shared across the Republic and in the rest of the UK. It is only Ulster nationalists who are not concerned? I think that unlikely and will believe it when the matter has been tested with significant levels of immigration into nationalist communities.