Bonnet bees: Belfast riots, sporting firsts and jabs about vaccines
My weekly release of bees from my bonnet (did I say this was coming on Mondays?)
Rioting loyalists
Sam McBride, the political editor of the News Letter in Belfast, which happens to be the world’s oldest English language daily newspaper still in publication, having first appeared in 1737, summed it up rather well in this tweet:
Sam McBride knows a thing or two about Northern Ireland’s image having been the author of a riveting but also disturbing bestseller about the province’s “cash for ash” political scandal over the millions wasted — and distributed to political cronies — in the past decade in subsidies called the “renewable heat incentive”, which created plenty of incentive but was of no benefit to the environment. His book, “Burned” (2019) even has a sadly appropriate title given what has happened in Belfast and other Northern Irish cities in recent weeks. Yet what is really disturbing is actually an old, old story: the lack of serious interest in English political and media circles in what goes on in Northern Ireland. Iraqi TV no doubt can be forgiven for coming to the story rather late, but not the English.
If buses and cars had been set on fire and petrol bombs thrown by crowds of young people (mainly men) in the suburbs of Paris, say, or in an English city such as Manchester or Birmingham, it would have been front page news in London virtually from the start. It would have invited — rightly or wrongly — discussions of whether the relevant government was going to fall or ministers resign, or whether similarly drastic consequences might ensue. But rioting in Belfast is treated as a minor irritant, almost as if it is just normal, even though gladly it has been far from normal now for two decades. The BBC’s main news bulletins chose not to make it a main story until several days had passed. It was on the digital equivalent of inside pages in the main newspapers. I hesitate to mention it, but my own former employer, The Economist, thought it just worth about 600 words and no leader, with the story not even published in international print editions. When columnists in British newspapers eventually got round to pontificating about the riots many of them began in the same way, as if following a script, by saying “this is not a return to The Troubles”.
How do they know? Let’s hope they are proved right, but the three decades of violence that carry that name and which took more than 3,500 lives, by far the worst death toll from political violence in post-1945 Western Europe, began in the late 1960s in just this sort of way, albeit in that case with Catholic demonstrations rather than Protestant ones. The massive bombs and organised violence between the nationalist IRA and the various Loyalist paramilitary organisations came later, as did the massive presence of British troops. Understandably, in the English mind Northern Irish violence is associated principally with the IRA, for it was the IRA and its offshoots that brought bombs to the English mainland, killed politicians and attempted to kill Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet at the Tory party conference in Brighton in 1983. What those British commentators mean is that these riots, which have taken place in Protestant/Loyalist areas, albeit spreading to “interfaces” where Protestant and Catholic communities connect, do not constitute a resumption of the civil war that was brought to an end in 1998 with the “Good Friday” or “Belfast” Agreement between the British and Irish governments, the EU, and political leaders representing those two Northern Irish communities.
All such punditry should add the word “yet”.
This year is the anniversary of the creation of Northern Ireland in 1921, when the granting of “home rule” and then independent but Dominion status to what was then called the Irish Free State was accompanied by partition of the island’s 32 counties into 26 in the Free State and 6 in the new province of Northern Ireland that remained in the UK (thus representing a diminished version of the historic region of Ulster, from 9 counties to 6). What is worth recalling, when looking at today’s disorder in Belfast and other cities, is that in the decades leading to Irish independence and partition it was on the Unionist side that the first large-scaled armed militias were created: the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1912-13, with at least 100,000 men under arms, and which smuggled in tens of thousands of weapons during the succeeding years, even after the First World War had begun. Their cause was the fear that with constitutional change — home rule, at that point — Protestants/Unionists stood to lose out badly, given the island’s Catholic majority. Home rule was considered a betrayal of the Protestant cause by the government in Westminster. Independence led to a civil war in the future Republic of Ireland, but not in Northern Ireland, thanks to partition and the retention of political power in the province by the Unionists. [By the way, as far as this Englishman can tell there is no real difference between “loyalists” and “unionists”, except that as “unionist” came to be associated with political parties and the establishment in Northern Ireland, “loyalist” came to be used for working class Protestants and, especially, for paramilitary groups. Perhaps someone will tell me if I have misunderstood.]
The point is not to claim that history repeats itself, but as Mark Twain said it does often rhyme. This article in the Guardian by Jonathan Powell, who as Tony Blair’s chief of staff in 1997-2007 played a central role in political talks in Northern Ireland, puts the issues particularly well. The riots since the beginning of this month have many apparent causes — local poverty and other deprivation, anger at the non-enforcement of COVID rules on nationalist and Sinn Fein attendees at the funeral of a leading ex-IRA figure last year, the Brexit deal which, against all Boris Johnson’s promises, separated Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK and created a border in the Irish Sea, police action against drugs gangs, and doubtless more — but there is one constant, ominous thread. This is the fear among Loyalists that they are again being betrayed by the British government and that their own political leaders are also failing them, while some sort of slippery slope has developed that is giving nationalism an advantage.
Certainly, a return to full-scale conflict is avoidable. But it needs some much more serious attention to be paid to all these issues by Boris Johnson and his government, with serious engagement too with the Irish government and the European Commission, to enable them to play their parts.
Two sporting firsts
Now let’s be a little lighter. I’m no sports nut-case but the past weekend did bring two pleasurable firsts which deserve acknowledgement.
As, I am sure, for many people of my generation in Britain, the movie “National Velvet” has a prominent part in my childhood memories, for it seemed to be almost constantly on TV, especially in the run-up to the Grand National at Aintree. We should note that in that poster for the movie, Mickey Rooney is given higher billing than the real star of both film and the 1935 book, namely “Velvet” and the young Elizabeth Taylor who played her as she won the race. So it was great that all these decades later life finally caught up with fiction with the first female jockey to win that great steeplechase. The other pleasurable first is that the US Masters was won by a Japanese golfer for the first time, which given Japan’s obsession with golf is quite surprising. During the “bubble years” of the 1980s, golf-club membership prices were one of the signs of speculative excess, and anyone looking out of an office window in Tokyo is likely to see evidence of golf mania all around in the form of roof-top driving ranges.
Here is what I wrote in my Japan Society blog yesterday:
In a more escapist but limelight-snatching way, the past weekend has been a great one for sporting “firsts”, for both our countries. Japan’s female golfers will no doubt have been celebrating the fact that their menfolk finally caught up with the women’s achievements, when Hideki Matsuyama became the first Japanese male to win one of golf’s four “majors”, through his splendid victory at the US Masters at Augusta National in Georgia. This came a mere 44 years after Hisako Higuchi triumphed at the 1977 Women’s PGA tournament in America (then known as LPGA), an equivalent “major” in the women’s sport. One noteworthy point from the TV coverage of the Masters, at least in British eyes, was the number of spectators, which shows the differing attitudes to COVID-risk between the US and Europe and ought perhaps to be an encouraging omen for the Tokyo OIympics.
Horse-racing’s Grand National steeplechase at Aintree, near Liverpool, was run without spectators, but in this always epic but terrifying race over high fences it is doubtful that either the jockeys or the horses pay all that much attention to the crowd. Here the British “first” was actually an Irish victory, since Rachael Blackmore from Tipperary became the first female jockey to win the Grand National, in her case a mere 77 years since the young Elizabeth Taylor achieved the same result in the 1944 Hollywood movie, National Velvet, itself based on Enid Bagnold’s popular 1935 novel of the same name. It would be surprising if the Queen, who is famously keen and expert on horse-racing, did not watch the race and even amid her grief enjoy this historic moment in what has long been something of a national event.
Jabs about vaccines in Japan and Italy
We are all fixated by vaccines right now, and my local fixation concerns when Ireland (where I live) will finally announce when it is that my age group (60-65) will be called for their jabs. This week, thanks to what seems to me an over-cautious decision to limit use of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine to just the over-60s, causing the abrupt cancellation of 15,000 vaccinations for high-risk younger people, my group may have finally caught a break. It sounds as if my jab will now come sooner as a result since there will otherwise be unused AZ doses sitting in fridges. Nevertheless, beyond self-interest, my two main vaccine bees concern Japan and Italy.
To guess the bee buzzing in my head about Japan, just look at this chart. The country that in about 100 days is due to host the Olympic Games and so will receive tens of thousands of competitors, foreign delegations and sundry entourages, has barely begun vaccinations. The reason is that the Ministry of Health and Welfare insists on special Japanese clinical trials for all vaccines approved in the country and has so far approved only the Pfizer/BioNTech jab. No effort it seems has been made either to accelerate this process or to bring on stream local vaccine manufacturing capacity at a stage early enough to make a difference.
Now for Italy. Last week the prime minister, Mario Draghi, made a somewhat angry statement about vaccinations in his country because it had become clear that in many regions all sorts of “economic” groups, which means lobbies, were being given precedence ahead of vaccinating the elderly. The management of the programme had been delegated to the country’s regional governments and some had their own views about priorities. In Tuscany, lawyers had claimed an “essential” status. An excellent article by Miles Johnson in the Financial Times, behind a paywall but reachable here by those with access, showed how in Puglia all sorts of people had somehow got themselves defined as health-care workers, leaving almost all those aged 70-79 still waiting. The most telling chart was this one, about how unlike in other European countries Italy’s death rate had been rising even after the vaccination programme had got fully under way. There may be numerous factors, but failure to vaccinate those most at risk must be high among them.