In Northern Ireland, Fire Has Long Been Used as a Weapon of Fear

Europe|In Northern Ireland, Fire Has Long Been Used as a Weapon of Fear

An effigy of a boat filled with migrants, placed on top of a bonfire and set alight. Homes set on fire during a spasm of riots. Displaced families fleeing as angry mobs hurled Molotov cocktails.

This drumbeat of anti-immigrant episodes has taken place over the last five weeks in Northern Ireland. But the images have also brought to mind darker moments in the history of the territory, where fire was long used to intimidate and force out people seen by some as outsiders.

The target of this most recent wave of violence is different from those of the sectarian attacks that defined this land during the Troubles. That decades-long conflict was between the region’s hard-line Protestant Loyalists, who believed Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom, and Irish Catholic nationalists, who wanted the territory to become part of the Republic of Ireland.

But the violence shares a common message: You are not welcome here. If you won’t leave, we may make you.

“Territorialism in Northern Ireland is still embedded — and not only embedded, it’s being patrolled by armed groups,” said Duncan Morrow, a politics professor at Ulster University in Belfast. “Northern Ireland as a society escalates extremely rapidly, because so much of this is already in the whole way society’s organized.”

The town of Ballymena, about 30 miles from Belfast, is sometimes called the “buckle” of Northern Ireland’s Protestant Bible Belt. The most recent violence erupted there after two 14-year-old boys were charged with the attempted oral rape of a local girl on June 7. The two boys, who the BBC reported spoke in court through a Romanian translator, denied the charges.