Living the peace process in reverse: racist violence and British nationalism in Northern Ireland

Abstract

In 1971 British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling suggested that the situation in Northern Ireland amounted to ‘an acceptable level of violence’. During ‘the Troubles’ this became the de facto security policy of successive British governments prepared to countenance a ‘manageable’ level of paramilitary activity. This reality supposedly changed irrevocably with the peace process and the 1997 Good Friday Agreement. Over the last fifteen years, however, Northern Ireland has been dubbed ‘the race hate capital of Europe’ with the ‘targeting of ethnic minorities’ by loyalist paramilitaries characterised as ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the police. The demography of Northern Ireland is changing, with eastern EU and non-white migrant workers arriving, which accentuates the reversing Protestant/Catholic differential and further undermines the ‘Protestant majoritarianism’ on which the state was founded. Alongside ‘flags protests’, racist violence has become one of the principal manifestations of unionist unease. The riposte by the state to racism has been to reach for empty models of ‘hate crime’ and ‘good relations’ alongside a criminal justice policy that appears to find acceptable a certain level of racist violence. Broadly, therefore, the author characterises the experience of people of colour and migrant workers in Northern Ireland as ‘living the peace process in reverse’. He concludes that this reality has profound implications – both for the future of Northern Ireland and for the ways in which we understand the relationship between the state and new forms of British nationalism across the UK.