Another night, another city in flames. Belfast’s streets, once the crucible of a peace process we held up as a model to the world, now smoulder under the weight of unresolved hatreds. ‘I will never get over watching my home burn,’ a resident told reporters, and one feels the raw, visceral tragedy of a life reduced to rubble.
But let us not pretend this is a bolt from the blue. This is the predictable climax of a decade of political decay, a slow rot masked by the thin veneer of prosperity and good governance. The UK government pledges a ‘security surge’, as if a few extra constables with riot shields will cauterise the wounds of a fractured society.
This is the same gesture Rome made when it dispatched legions to Britannia: a show of force that only postpones the reckoning. We have become a nation that mistakes policing for statesmanship, that believes in the efficacy of hardware over healing. The disorder in Belfast is not a failure of security; it is a failure of culture, of leadership, of imagination.
We have forgotten that peace is not a static condition but a dynamic struggle, requiring constant nurture. The Victorian era understood this. It knew that empire required a civilising mission, however condescending we now find that phrase.
But what is our mission today? To manage decline? To keep the lid on a boiling pot?
The irony is that the very forces we unleashed in the name of ‘progress’—globalisation, multiculturalism, the erosion of local identity—have now come home to roost. Belfast’s anger is a symptom of a deeper malady: the collapse of shared narratives. Without a story that binds us, we are left with only grievances.
And grievances, when fuelled by social media and petty politicians, turn to fire. The security surge will hold the line for now. But the ashes will remain, and the embers will wait for the next gust of wind.
When will we learn that the only way to put out a fire is to address the arsonist’s cause?
