Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
‘I should have met nationalists near bonfire row site’
DOUG Beattie said he accepts criticism for not visiting neighbouring nationalists when he was invited to the site of a contentious loyalist bonfire.
But the UUP leader also strongly defended going to the interface bonfire in North Belfast, the focus of community tensions ahead of July’s Eleventh Night.
A judge last month ruled the pyre in Tigers Bay had been used by some loyalists to “intimidate and terrorise” residents in the nationalist
New Lodge by hitting golf balls, throwing bricks and singing sectarian songs.
Mr Justice
Horner said it was “intimidation of the worst kind” and was “designed to incite, to try and produce a visceral reaction”.
The detailed judgment followed the High Court in July dismissing a legal attempt by two Stormont ministers to force police to help remove the bonfire.
Mr Beattie was among several unionist leaders who defended the pyre in Adam Street.
He insisted he was glad he went to listen to the community after being invited to see the bonfire.
Mr Beattie said the people there had made significant efforts to “try and calm the situation”.
He was told an individual had “handed himself in to the PSNI” and golf clubs were confiscated after golf balls were hit towards the New Lodge.
He added: “So actually the community were trying to do something very proactive to try to cut that out.
“There is a narrative here that everything that they do is always done in the most negative, sectarian or antinationalist manner, when in some cases what they were literally just doing was supporting their own
culture.
“If there was a criticism of me, and I’ll accept this criticism, that maybe I should have gone across into the nationalist area and said to them, ‘What is your genuine issue in regards to this?’, and I’ll take that as an accepted criticism.
“But I’ll not take a criticism of going and meeting the community who invited me to visit that bonfire site and explained to me the issues and the things they had done to try and calm the situation – and actually they had done an awful lot.”