Irish Examiner view: Intolerance fuelled unrest in Ballymena
A firefighter at Larne Leisure Centre which was vandalised after violence and public disorder in Ballymena spread to Larne. Picture: Liam McBurney
In recent days, there has been sustained rioting in Ballymena, in the North. Readers have no doubt seen for themselves on television and social media plentiful footage of disorder and chaos from the town in Antrim.
There was a time when such violence was very familiar, and at this time of year in particular. The North’s marching season often involved confrontation between different groups, and the imagery of police in riot gear and youths throwing petrol bombs was a regular feature of the evening news.
This violence is different, however.
It began as a peaceful protest after an alleged sexual assault in the area, an incident which resulted in two teenage boys being charged at Coleraine Magistrates’ Court on Monday morning. The two boys had a Romanian interpreter in court and there is an undeniable racial component to the subsequent violent demonstrations, with the PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Ryan Henderson describing those scenes as “racist thuggery targeted at ethnic minorities and police officers”.
The disorder has led to dozens of police officers being injured and has spread elsewhere in the North, including Larne. A leisure centre in the latter town was set alight after it was suggested that families driven out of Ballymena would be accommodated there.
The apparent breakdown of law and order in one small town in the North is shocking in and of itself, with the scale of violence so great that police forces in Scotland have promised to send officers to help. The weaponisation of an alleged crime to facilitate racially-motivated rioting is a significant development, and a worrying one.
There will be plenty of observers south of the border happy to point out that decades of institutional bigotry in the North may have prepared fertile ground for various forms of intolerance. Whatever substance there may be to that view, it would be naive to imagine a similar situation arising here might not be subject to the same kind of manipulation.
News of a major air disaster is always chilling, and that was certainly the case yesterday when we learned of the crash of Air India Flight AI171.
The London-bound aircraft, carrying 242 people, crashed shortly after take-off in Ahmedabad, western India, and was scheduled to fly to Gatwick.
At the time of writing, the final death toll had not been established. The plane came down in a residential area and is understood to have crashed directly into an accommodation block which houses medical staff.
The cause of the crash has not been determined yet. Investigators will be keen to examine the black box flight recorders from the aircraft, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner.
It was unsurprising that that company’s stock price fell sharply once news of the crash spread. Though reports suggest it is the first crash involving an aircraft of that type, the entire 787 fleet was reportedly grounded in 2013 after fires related to batteries in its electrical power system.
This news will have a particular resonance in Ireland, and Cork in particular, as it is almost exactly 40 years to the day since Air India Flight 182 — a passenger flight on the Montreal-Mumbai route — crashed off our south-west coast.
On June 23, 1985, Flight 182, a Boeing 747-237B, broke up when a bomb planted by Canadian Sikh terrorists exploded in its cargo area. There was a major recovery operation undertaken at the time to retrieve the bodies, one of the largest missions of its kind in Irish history, while hundreds of relatives of those lost in the crash travelled to Ireland in the aftermath. A memorial at Ahakista in West Cork, built at the nearest point on land to where Air India Flight 182 disintegrated, was unveiled on the first anniversary of the bombing in June 23, 1986.
Some 30 years after that unveiling, the Canadian ambassador to Ireland, Kevin Vickers, said: “Canada will be forever indebted to the people of Cork and of the community here on the Sheep’s Head for all the support and kindness [they] have shown the relatives and their families.”
Many of those people who remember 1985 will be thinking of Flight AI171 today.
The phone pouch scheme for schools remains a lightning rod for controversy.
We learned this week that a tender for the central provision of the pouches was published in January but the Department of Education last week stated that the competition would be cancelled without a winner, though 12 tenders were received.
The department will issue guidance on developing school policy on phone use and on how to apply for funding for the pouches, even though schools are not obliged to apply for the funding.
This means a delay in implementing policy, increased bureaucracy, and higher costs — all for the sake of an unnecessary initiative being introduced as a top-down measure, when school phone storage is a classic example of a local issue requiring local solutions.
This ongoing fiasco is reminiscent of the cliched scenario in which a sensible six-year-old child points out the obvious and glaring flaws in a plan to adults who are invested in approving that plan.
The Department of Education is not the only State body in need of that kind of advice but it would do well even now to listen to this mythical six-year-old and abandon this measure.
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