Belfast rioters: a band of opportunists savouring their newfound notoriety

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/10/belfast-rioters-union-flag-opportunists

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This is not who we are. The child-rioters lobbing petrol bombs under the sickly sodium glare of street lights. The masked man battering a police Land Rover with a sledge-hammer. The woman screeching "No surrender" through the broken glass door of Belfast city hall. The actions of these people are as alien, bizarre and offensive to the vast majority of us living in Northern Ireland – whatever our perceived political or religious background – as they would be to any outsider. They are a source of profound embarrassment and shame.

For those living elsewhere, watching news footage of the recent loyalist riots, it must seem as though the whole city is on fire. The reality is quite different. The trouble is highly localised, centred on one particular area of inner east Belfast. You could be living two or three streets away and see and hear nothing; I live within a mile of the centre of the riots, and all is as normal. About 80,000 people live in east Belfast as a whole, but those engaged in rioting number only a few hundred at most, sometimes much fewer, and many of them are youngsters in their teens.

They are a tiny, embittered, radically disaffected bunch who have little idea of who they are and what they want, apart from the reinstatement of the union flag above city hall. High on rage and adrenaline, they fail to see that their self-defeating actions play right into the hands of republicans, the group they despise most fiercely. And the more extreme and dysfunctional the tantrums get, the more Sinn Féin representatives appear calm, reasonable and self-assured, almost as though they are drawing some kind of weird strength from the loyalist meltdown – which of course drives the loyalists themselves into further paroxysms of fury.

The self-appointed ringleaders of the protests may claim – with a chillingly Stalinist ring – to speak for "the people", the wide sweep of the Protestant working class, but they are largely a group of hardline preachers and failed politicians whose crackpot views rendered them unelectable. Most people, including the majority of unionists, find the pronouncements they make distasteful and extreme. But you can tell that these once-obscure opportunists are savouring their newfound notoriety. Suddenly their presence is sought-after, their opinions courted.

Willie Frazer, the most prominent of the protest organisers, has already popped up on Radio 4's PM programme and the Jeremy Vine show, to the incredulity of those in Northern Ireland who thought that his particular brand of inarticulate paranoia was consigned to the past. Frazer – who was recently filmed telling loyalist protesters that "we will not be dictated to by gunmen, mass murderers and paedophiles" – has contested several elections, has never been elected, and in most cases lost his deposit.

So we are talking about a relatively small number of protesters, led by a ragtag bunch of unelected malcontents, and an even smaller number of rioters. Why then does it feel as though the country is being brought, once more, to its knees? People are frightened to go into Belfast city centre, causing further economic pain to businesses already badly affected by the recession. It's estimated that the riots cost local retailers £3m over Christmas. The harm done to our fragile sense of equilibrium, though incalculable, is just as costly.

This is because Northern Ireland – despite the comfortable fiction that we're all sorted out now, job done – continues to exist in a state of collective post-traumatic stress, sensitised to the possibility of a return to violence, a collapse of the political institutions. Even low levels of street disorder have the capacity to generate widespread fear. And that is where the real damage is done. It is a matter of perception, not fact.

Dread is a powerful weapon. Here in Northern Ireland, the destructive actions of the fear-mongering few still have the power to terrorise the many. The sky may not be falling in, but sometimes it feels as though it is.