After the riots in Belfast in September,
and the police chief's call to reason
through the media I found the following
in an old email. It is a timeless
piece of writing, when I first read it
I was acutely reminded of one
of my favourite writers J. G. Ballard...
The Irish Times - Wednesday,
July 7, 2010
Heroic Belfast youths engage in rites of noble heritage
NEWTON EMERSON
NEWTON'S OPTIC: THIS WEEKEND’S
rioting in Belfast shows the adaptable, innovative and modernising side of the
city’s feral underclass.
Think of a sectarian interface in Northern Ireland
and you will almost certainly picture inner-city streets of run-down terraced
housing, separated by corrugated iron peace walls decorated with naff
“community” murals.
But the flashpoint of this weekend’s disturbances was a
new roundabout over a six-lane underpass, connecting a retail park and a
shopping centre to the M1 and Westlink urban motorways.
It would be hard to
imagine a more typical 21st-century landscape, let alone one more forbidding to
human interaction.
The roundabout itself is nearly a quarter of a mile wide,
surrounded by multi-lane approaches and high-speed on-ramps. Pedestrian access
is strictly corralled through crash-proof steel barriers.
Yet the heroic
youth of loyalist south Belfast and republican west Belfast crossed this hostile
wasteland to engage in the rites of their noble heritage, proving that the
ancient traditions of Ulster will not be crushed beneath the tarmac and concrete
of materialist car culture.
In so doing they reclaimed a sterile space which
the planners had sought to deny them, echoing other progressive urban movements
like London’s guerrilla gardeners or Italy’s slow cities
campaign.
Ironically, it is suspected that the Westlink was deliberately
built to separate South and West Belfast, so rioting on its major overpass
subverts its intended function in a joyous celebration of spontaneous urban
vitality.
It is only a pity that the 123ft-high aluminium peace sculpture in
the centre of the roundabout has not yet been built due to lack of funds, as it
could have been dismantled for missiles and weapons in a powerful act of
symbolic repossession.
After trashing the roundabout, trouble then spread to
the nearby Bog Meadows Nature Reserve. It might seem that rioting in a bog is a
backward step, pandering to outdated and possibly racist stereotypes of ignorant
muck-splattered savagery.
However, the Bog Meadows Nature Reserve is a Unesco
award-winning wildfowl refuge based on the latest thinking in wetland and
grassland conservation. Bringing this challenging space into the sphere of
rioting venues is a triumph of logistics, lateral thinking and environmental
awareness which greatly advances the dynamic of urban conflict situations.
It
means, for example, that when a police officer shouts “duck” they might now be
referring to an actual duck.
Finally, after trashing the Bog Meadows, both
sides attacked the Donegall Road Kentucky Fried Chicken in a postmodern
rejection of both shallow consumerism and their own disgusting obesity.
This
is the largest Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Ireland, while the US state of
Kentucky is strongly associated with Ulster-Scots influence, tying in potent
themes of cross-community and anti-capitalist tension with the “drive-through”
motif of the earlier disturbances at the roundabout.
In many ways, the entire
weekend can thus be seen as a triptych of performance art set-pieces,
unconstrained by the physical and mental barriers of provincial bourgeois
society.
It is often said that Belfast’s shiny peace process makeover is a
superficial development which has passed the urban underclass by. This weekend,
loyalist and republican rioters proved otherwise.
They are every bit as happy
wrecking the new city centre as they were wrecking the old one.
