The skinny schoolkid petrol bombers
Suzanne Breen on the children being manipulated to riot
A SKINNY boy in white trousers, a dark jacket and a black ski mask, he emerges from the crowd to throw the first petrol bomb of the night at a police Land Rover in Carrickfergus. It misses and explodes beside a parked car.
He looks about 13. Somewhere, not far from where the riot is unfolding, his school uniform hangs waiting for a return to class after the Easter holidays next Monday.
He’s likely to have started secondary school just 19 months ago; still finding his feet with the older lads, trying to fit in. Despite his youth, or maybe because of it, he’s centre-stage on Monday night.
A crowd of around 30 young people — mostly aged from 12 to 19 — took on the PSNI to the best of their ability as older men stood on the sidelines giving instructions and advice, keeping the kids “right” in their battle with police.
It started around 9.30pm and ended just before 1am. The PSNI helicopter was overhead for the early part of the night. Police attempted to move in around 10pm but then backed off.
If the history of Northern Ireland riots is ever written, this one won’t merit a mention.
It paled into insignificance compared to the white hot hunger strike disturbances in republican areas in 1981.
But the point is that we are 40 years on. That skinny boy experienced nothing of the Troubles. He was born a full decade after the Good Friday Agreement.
The children we saw in advertisements in 1998, as the governments sold us the peace accord, had a very different outlook.
That famous Northern Ireland Office commercial, where Van sings Days Like This, follows two boys spending the afternoon rolling down sand dunes and playing on the beach in perfect peace, hands holding pebbles, not petrol
bombs. That future projected for our youth is a million miles from what we’ve witnessed in loyalist areas in recent days.
The peace dividend for them wasn’t meant to be a criminal record.
Ask that skinny boy and his mates about the ins and outs of the Northern Ireland Protocol, and they wouldn’t have a clue.
Our current trading arrangements aren’t part of their everyday conversation.
A sense of betrayal by the British Government over the Irish Sea Border, and fury at Sinn Fein and the PSNI over the Bobby Storey funeral, is widespread in working-class loyalist areas.
It has been intensified by some unionist politicians.
The disturbances are not spontaneous. Those organising “protests” on social media know full well what way they will likely work out.
The hand of certain paramilitary factions, meant to have left the stage a long time ago, is clear in some cases.
But many of the rioters themselves are just bored kids, looking for excitement in areas where they complain of having nothing else to do.
Staying out late, playing with the ‘big boys’ will have been the highlight of a dreary lockdown year.
In 2009 and 2010 it was young republicans rioting in Ardoyne which hit the headlines. Youngsters, who should have long been in bed, hurled bricks, bottles and petrol bombs at the PSNI. Photos from Troubles archives show kids, much younger than today’s teenage loyalists, out rioting on our streets.
There are countless 1980s images of primary school children armed with missiles, digging up roads for masonry to throw, standing at barricades with stockings over their faces, or proudly posing at burnt-out cars.
With longer evenings, the lifting of Covid restrictions, and the band season starting, the trouble on our streets will likely continue. It follows in a long tradition of inflicting misery on many, and harming the life chances of the youngsters taking part.