Neil McCarthy: ​The certainties of the Northern Ireland conflict are blurring as a new conflict looms

We have seen some extraordinary images in Northern Ireland in the last couple of weeks.

A PSNI vehicle careering through Camlough in South Armagh with its siren blaring; Armagh GAA fans on the footpath rejoicing at their team’s victory in Croke Park. That didn’t look like it was going to end well on first viewing.

And then look. A GAA fan on Twitter pointed out that if Galway had won instead of Armagh, scenes of Gardaí fraternising with Galway fans would have been unremarkable. Seeing that PSNI vehicle lurching over to the fans on the footpath in Camlough and the driver then picking up and waving an Armagh flag from his window however was remarkable. In fact it was mindboggling.

Then there were the images of anti-Islam protestors in Belfast waving union flags and Irish tricolours side by side. The backstory here was that the ‘Coolock Says No’ campaign in Dublin – a campaign against the placing of asylum seekers in a disused factory in a North Dublin working class suburb – had sent up representatives to Belfast to join the anti-Islam demonstration. What was clear was that this unity was unprecedented. The protestors waving their union flags and tricolours in front of serried ranks of PSNI Land Rovers didn’t just occupy the same space, they danced together. Those protestors went on to riot and cause criminal damage to businesses run by foreign nationals.

Despite utterly unexpected fraternisation being the common thread here, the reactions of unionist and nationalist politicians to the events in Camlough were predictable. It was all outrage from unionists and mystical ‘hand of history’ rhetoric from nationalists; and, for good measure, nationalists completely ignored the alarming driving whilst unionists went into overdrive on it.

PSNI chief Jon Boutcher’s masterly speech to the Policing Board last Thursday restored equilibrium. There was a sense of the centre holding and also an observation from Boutcher that it was important to place these things in perspective given the much more portentous events taking place on the mainland in the wake of the savage murders of the three children in Southport.

Many unionists had bridled at the widespread observation from nationalists that one policeman’s actions in Camlough had done more for community policing in a few minutes than decades of well meaning talk. Yet the kernel of truth is there.

Peter Taylor – the long-time chronicler of the Troubles for British television audiences – has always maintained that policing was at the heart of the Northern Ireland problem. Back in the day Ian Paisley tied “open support for the police and law enforcement” from republicans to his willingness to share power with them. In May 2007 Sinn Féin accordingly voted in a special conference to support policing in Northern Ireland.

Seventeen years later we can see what that support really looks like. The price of it for unionists is parts of Northern Ireland looking more and more like Galway. Northern Ireland is not homogeneous. It has much in common with Belgium and Switzerland. Nationalists settling in comfortably to a place in the sun in NI was never going to involve them “living like Protestants” as Terence O’Neill put it in 1969. To settle in comfortably they were going to have to be allowed to be themselves.

As unsettling as this is proving for many unionists, it comes with the reassurance that the union with Great Britain may now have many, many more years to run. The equally unexpected events in Belfast last Saturday look like unsettling Sinn Féin more than anyone else. They felt the need to isolate their followers in the Lower Ormeau from any identification with protestors/rioters bearing tricolours in front of advancing PSNI Land Rovers. They invited the PSNI in to keep the ‘fascists’ out. The former Sinn Féin MLA for Lagan Valley, Paul Butler, wrote on his Twitter account of “Free State racist thugs joining forces with loyalist racist thugs in Belfast today to try and spread hatred”. Quite what a united Ireland without Free Staters and loyalists would look like is anyone’s guess. Jamie Bryson in turn took pains to warn loyalists of the dangers of any kind of alliance with Irish nationalists after the events in Belfast. Both he and Butler seem to prefer the certainties of a conflict which has now run out of steam to the uncertainties of a conflict which is only just beginning.

In the meantime we can all feel pride in the extraordinary successes of athletes from Northern Ireland in the Olympic Games in Paris.

• Neil McCarthy is a writer and teacher based in Dublin and London