Ian Acheson Ian Acheson

Northern Ireland is descending back into sectarianism

A republican bonfire set alight this week

Nearly 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement, the embers of sectarianism in Northern Ireland are still glowing bright.

This week thousands of young nationalists at a west Belfast community and music festival ended the night by chanting pro-IRA slogans. They were seemingly oblivious to the fact that the IRA murdered more Roman Catholics in the Troubles than any other combatants.

The spectacle of kids, born after the guns went silent, gleefully venerating terrorists who brought such pain and suffering to the whole community was depressing enough. But it gets worse. The West Belfast based Féile (festival), where the chanting took place, is publicly funded by Belfast City Council, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and NI tourism board. And this offensive chanting has taken place at the festival for several years. Only now, after persistent questioning by the BBC’s Nolan Show (also responsible for revealing the moral corruption of Stonewall), have some of these bodies grudgingly accepted they need to review their financial and corporate endorsement of the event.

For too long institutional timidity and political chicanery has given Sinn Fein’s ‘Green’ sectarianism a free pass. In this environment, republicans have adopted a moral superiority that is pure, unimpeachable and unquestionable. The party’s propagandists have been successful in framing unionists as the sole culprits of sectarianism – quite an achievement for the former political mouthpiece of terrorists who painted the province with the blood of their neighbours for 30 years.

So when a rap group named after the IRA’s favourite community control tactic, ‘Kneecap’, unveiled a mural this week in west Belfast of a burning police Land Rover, it was instantly defended by many republicans not as a repulsive celebration of violence against the Irish men and women in uniform inside it but rather as ‘culture’.

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