Night in Belfast that showed me how fragile peace really is
The battle of Tiger’s Bay, a gritty Protestant housing estate in Belfast, commenced under the gaze of Union flags draped from residents’ windows demonstrating unswerving loyalty to Great Britain and the Queen.
Prince Philip’s death had just been announced and the community forum of Tiger’s Bay had posted his picture with a message that called for peace during the days of mourning.
I saw that hope dashed within hours when, out on the streets that night, a burning car laced with fireworks rolled towards me, gathering speed as it was pushed down a slope by masked rioters.
I ran to safety behind a line of police officers with riot shields as the hijacked car exploded in a blaze of light 30 yards away. Clouds of acrid smoke and firework sulphur made my eyes water while some of the policemen started to cough.
Surreally, the doomed vehicle’s alarm began bleeping forlornly, before flames transformed it into a metal carcass.
The rioters didn’t stop there. They hurled bricks torn from walls, pavement stones and even a shed door, its latches still intact, at the police line.
A hooded figure ran behind a flaming wheelie bin and shoved it our way.
The police ordered me back to the estate’s edge, where I watched from a burned-down bus shelter, one of the first casualties of the six-hour Tiger’s Bay riot.
When the officer in charge shouted ‘Forward’, they marched towards the loyalist agitators, pushing them back towards their homes. The manoeuvre stopped a confrontation with their opponents from the Catholic community of New Lodge who were out on the streets nearby.
Ironically, I witnessed this ugly scene on the eve of the 23rd anniversary of the 1998 peace agreement designed to end sectarian violence in Northern Ireland forever.
For 30 years, this corner of the UK played host to a bitter religious civil war called – in an understatement – the Troubles. Now the violence has returned. Night after night since easter, young Protestant Unionists, who want Northern Ireland to remain in the UK, have fought against equally youthful Catholic nationalists, who dream of a united Ireland.
In the middle are police, firing plastic bullets and deploying water cannons – banned in mainland Britain and brought out for the first time in six years last Thursday night – as they try to keep control.
TV and internet footage of the unrest have flashed across the world, prompting both Boris Johnson and President Joe Biden to appeal for calm.
A spokesman for the grass-roots Police Federation said the ‘shocking scenes’ have set Northern Ireland back years to a time everyone hoped had been consigned to history, while a senior police officer told a Belfast press conference that he didn’t rule out guns being carried on the streets by rioters if the urban warfare continues this summer.
So exactly why has violence erupted here again? A key trigger was the funeral last June of an notorious IrA kingpin, Bobby Storey, at the height of the Covid lockdown when mass gatherings were banned in Northern Ireland.
Last month after considering police evidence, the Public Prosecution Service announced no-one would be punished in connection with the funeral parade.
This led to furious allegations from Protestants that the Police Service in Northern Ireland (PSNI) is biased in favour of Catholics
and sparked the protests that escalated to violence. But Brexit is a factor, too. Many Protestants want the new trade border created in the Irish Sea (as a means of avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland and the republic of Ireland which remains in the eU) scrapped.
They say it cuts Northern Ireland adrift from the UK and threatens their identity as loyalists to Britain and the Crown.
Nationalists disagree. Yet, are a funeral and a border squabble really behind the return to sectarian violence? or has a religious apartheid here never really disappeared? Today it’s the youngsters of both communities who are on the frontline and a recent UN report has predicted that they, the so-called ‘Peace Agreement Generation’, are likely to be the next threat to harmony.
They have no memory of the
Troubles, nor have they had the ‘horrors of war’ explained to them. Instead, the Troubles have been romanticised by the older generation who lived through them, making some of these youngsters susceptible to taking up arms in sectarian conflict all over again. Certainly, many of the rioters I saw at Tiger’s Bay were very young, and three 14-year-old boys have been arrested for their part in that night’s events.
But while the Troubles may be glamourised in modern Northern Ireland, so, too, is peace.
This weekend – and despite the lockdown – I saw a group of Chinese tourist climbing into a taxi for a £59 tour of the 100 or so peace walls which dot the city.
one such 20ft wall of brick, metal and wire went up on the day the peace agreement was signed in 1998 and is within spitting distance of the riots breaking out now. on one side live Protestant children. on the other – just a few yards away – live young Catholics.
They may never meet until they are old enough to work: 93 per cent of state schools and many colleges and universities remain segregated by religion.
Not far from Belfast city centre, I talk to a taxi driver waiting for a fare. he is a Somalian and a Muslim and has lived in Belfast for 30 years. What he says is chilling: ‘My religion means I take no sides over who is Protestant and Catholic. I have asked youngsters at work to come to my house – I live in a Protestant area – for a meal with my family. When the Catholics hear my postcode, they always refuse. They say “I can’t go there, my people won’t let me”. It happens time and again.’
He tells me about the Albert Bridge which spans Belfast’s river Lagan. ‘The Catholics stay on the left pavement, the Protestants on the right,’ he explains. ‘The peace walls should be taken down. They are not for peace. If you put up a barrier between people and, particularly children, they cannot become friends. They are enemies for life.’
This week, a foreign TV crew filming the riots stopped a teenage Protestant boy and asked him why he was there. Was it about the sea border after Brexit?
The boy looked bewildered, before answering: ‘They [Catholics] get more than us.’
If the TV crew had posed the same question to a Catholic youngster, the chances are the response – about Protestants – would have been exactly the same. And that is a threat to any real peace in Northern Ireland.
RIGHT from the moment she burst onto our television screens, it was clear that Nikki Grahame was a force to be reckoned with.
dressed as a sexy pink bunny, in fishnet tights, satin corset and rabbit ears, for the launch of Big Brother 2006, she instantly made her mark as one of the most memorable contestants in the history of the channel 4 series.
Known for her tantrums and flounces, one was never sure how much was for the benefit of the cameras that recorded — and adored — her every move and outburst.
Apart from her tiny, child-like frame, back then the eating disorder that would eventually overwhelm her was still a carefully concealed secret.
But the truth is, even at the age of 24, Nikki had already been battling anorexia for 16 years, having first been caught in its vicious grip as an eight-year-old. It was only later, as her battle waxed and waned, that she summoned the courage to speak out about it.
It was always there, she said. Haunting her, waiting for her. ‘I know if hard times hit me there is every chance I could fall back on it,’ she said in 2014.
Over the past diabolical year, those hard times returned with a vengeance. during the weeks and months leading up to her tragic death last Friday, it had become painfully clear to her family and friends that 38-year-old Nikki was struggling to cope with the altered state of the world during lockdown.
cut off and isolated from the friends who usually sustained her, her Tv fame had largely dried up. Once the darling of the reality Tv world — she appeared on Big Brother four times and was given her own show, Princess Nikki — there was little left to silence the devilish voice in her head, telling her that when life seemed overwhelming, the way to take back control was to stop eating.
‘Last year really put the cap on it with covid,’ her mother Susan Grahame said just a fortnight ago, speaking out in desperation during her daughter’s final, ultimately fatal, relapse. She told ITv’s This Morning: ‘She had terminal loneliness, cut off, spending too much time on her own and nothing to think about other than food.
‘It all came to a grinding halt. With Nikki, she would get through the year knowing she had friends abroad and would visit them, but she spent a lot of time last year cancelling all her holidays.
‘It sounds crazy but even stuff like the gyms closing, which was quite important to Nikki because in order for her to eat she needs to know that she can exercise, and so when they closed it was quite a worry. And the isolation as well.
‘Obviously she couldn’t see anyone. I offered to stay with her but she said: “I need to stay in my own home.” It’s been really hard for her, really hard.’
What made Nikki’s battle particularly problematic was that her eating disorder began at such an early age. She traced it to the family break-up which turned her childhood in North-West London on its head.
‘Up until I was seven everything was fun,’ she wrote in her 2012 autobiography, Fragile. Her early years living with her older sister Natalie and their parents in a bungalow in Northwood were happy ones.
ASeLF-cONFeSSed ‘daddy’s girl’, she was particularly close to her father, dave, who worked in IT at a London bank as well her maternal grandfather.
‘Sometimes I think that house in Stanley Road will haunt me for the rest of my life — I was so happy there and I was a kid there,’ she wrote. ‘Because what I didn’t know then was that the time spent living in that house up until I was seven was my childhood — all of it.’
By her own account, everything changed when her father became embroiled in a drawn-out disciplinary action at work which left him stressed and angry and increasingly withdrawn. Her parents’ marriage began to suffer and there were frequent rows at home.
It was around the same time that a girl at her gymnastics club made a cruel ‘big bum’ comment to Nikki.
‘Somewhere in my seven-year-old brain I started to think that to be better at gymnastics and to be more popular, I had to be skinny.
‘And because I didn’t just want to be better than I was at gymnastics, but to be the best, then I couldn’t just be skinny. I would have to be the skinniest.’
Her parents’ decision to divorce when she was eight came just weeks after her grandfather’s death from bowel cancer.
Speaking two weeks ago about the events leading up to her daughter’s descent into anorexia, her mother conceded: ‘We had a lot of stuff going on, my dad got very sick, she was worried for me. My marriage broke up, my husband at the time had a lot of trouble at work, it wasn’t a happy place.’
Family break-ups are, sadly, not unusual. But by now, Nikki had begun to derive pleasure from denying herself food.
‘Not eating was something I was good at,’ she wrote. ‘Not eating became my hobby, something that was all mine and that I could be in control of while my family and my perfect life fell apart around me.’
When her weight plummeted and she refused to eat, her mother sought medical help.
‘At that time people found it hard to believe that an eight-year-old could be a victim of this,’ Susan said last month. ‘We did not have that kind of treatment. We did struggle. The help is a bit more out there than it once was.’
Nikki was a month shy of her ninth birthday and barely the weight of an average four-year-old by the time she was admitted for specialist treatment to the Maudsley Hospital in South-east London.
She put on enough weight to be discharged six months later but was far from cured.
‘Inside my head I was still as intent on starving myself as the day I’d arrived there,’ she said. ‘If anything, I was more determined than ever. The big difference was that I was now far cleverer at fooling people about what I was thinking.’
OveR the next few years, she went back and forth between home and hospital, putting on enough weight to get the doctors to agree to discharge her and then starving herself all over again once she got away.
She overdosed twice, once at the age of 13 while at Great Ormond Street Hospital. doctors there were forced to stitch a feeding line into her stomach because she kept pulling out the tube in her nose.
According to one of them, Nikki’s was the worst case of anorexia he’d ever seen.
But while experts came up with