The Belfast violence shows young workingclass people have been failed again

It’s 23 years since the signing of the Good Friday/Belfast agreement, which effectively brought the conflict in Northern Ireland to a halt but didn’t deliver on the promises of peace, prosperity and stability. It would be easy to attribute the recent violence in Belfast and elsewhere to Brexit, to the Northern Ireland protocol, to the perception of policing between the two communities among other things, but that would be a simplification of issues that run as deep as the Lagan river.

In 1998, when I was10 years old,my generation was told that peace was within reach, that the new Northern Ireland assembly would finally allow the people of this place to govern themselves. The devolution of policing and justice arrived after a number of false starts, and for a while, all seemed calm – yet much of it was held together by naivety and hope. The conflict may have ended, but the fighting didn’t. The fight for jobs, education, mental health and addiction support, for housing and investment continued on and on, with the political establishment across these islands simply equating the absence of violence with success of the peace process.

Except there was no process – there was war and then there was peace – the transition between the two didn’t manifest as a benefit to working-class communities across Northern Ireland in any real or meaningful way. Paramilitaries still exist, deprivation is still rife, educational underachievement and health inequalities still pervade in the most economically inactive parts of the country.

Brexit and the Northern Ireland protocol are only a small part of a larger tapestry among loyalism and workingclass unionists who now see themselves, whether rightly or wrongly, as being steamrollered by both their own political representatives and the British government. The anger about the trade agreement between the UK and the European Union, which established checks on goods between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, was palpable from the very early days of Theresa May’s draft withdrawal agreement, and that anger has only increased.

At different stages during the pandemic, lockdown restrictions have placed the Police Service of Northern Ireland at odds with republicans, loyalists and civil rights activists who have each been accused of breaking Covid-19 regulations for varying purposes.

The decision by the Public Prosecution Service not to pursue cases

Photograph: Peter Morrison/AP ‘On either side of the Lanark Way peace gates you will find two of the most deprived areas in Northern Ireland.’ Lanark Way in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on 7 April.