Belfast woke to ash and anger this morning. Flames that lit the sky in loyalist areas last night have left families homeless and a city on edge. In the shadow of the peace walls, windows are boarded up, cars are overturned and the smell of smoke clings to clothes.
‘I will never get over watching my home burn,’ said Mary McGrath, 58, a mother of three who fled her terraced house in the Carrick Hill estate as petrol bombs struck the roof. ‘We had nothing. We grabbed the kids and the dog and ran. The whole street was screaming.’
The trouble erupted after a protest march by loyalist groups descended into violence. Police say officers came under ‘sustained attack’ with bricks, fireworks and petrol bombs. In response, they deployed water cannon and made 12 arrests. But the real devastation is in the homes and shops that now lie charred.
The McGrath family is one of at least six displaced by fires that spread from the protest route into residential streets. Local community centres are acting as emergency shelters, distributing blankets and hot drinks to those who fled without coats.
‘This isn't politics. This is arson,’ said Father John Heaney, a Catholic priest who spent the night calming residents. ‘People are terrified. They don't know if they are safe in their own beds.’
The violence comes amid escalating tensions over the Northern Ireland Protocol, which has angered unionists who see it as undermining the province's place in the United Kingdom. But for those picking through the debris, the politics is distant. ‘I don't care about flags or borders. I just want my home back,’ said William Clarke, a retired dockworker whose living room window was smashed by a brick. ‘My wife is on heart medication. Last night, she couldn't get to the chemist.’
Local businesses are counting the cost. The ‘Happy Shopper’ convenience store on the Shankill Road was gutted. Its owner, Raj Patel, stared at the twisted metal shutters. ‘I've been here 20 years. Never seen it this bad. My insurance won't cover arson. Where do I go now?’
Northern Ireland's First Minister has condemned the violence, but residents want action. ‘Words are cheap,’ said Mary McGrath. ‘We need policing that stops this. We need jobs so people don't have time to throw stones. My son wants to be a mechanic. But when I look outside, I see nothing but broken glass.’
The community is scarred. Walls that once carried murals of the Troubles now display fresh graffiti taunting ‘IRA’ and ‘UVF’. The peace process is fraying. As the sun rose, a woman swept broken glass from her doorstep while her child played with a toy car in the gutter. Behind her, the shell of a burnt-out car still smouldered.
This is the real economy of sectarianism. Not the GDP figures, but the cost of a new front door, the price of a hot meal at a community centre, the value of a night's sleep without fear.
As the clean-up begins, the question hangs in the air: how many more nights like this before the fire reaches every kitchen table?
