History repeats?
This focus on defending Protestant turf from outsiders dates to Act I, Scene I of the Northern Ireland conflict. Those “Troubles” ignited in Belfast in August 1969 with loyalist attacks on Irish nationalist households, driving out thousands of Catholics to create exclusively Protestant areas — a sectarian map still starkly in evidence today.
Near spots where Catholics were burned from their homes two generations ago, 40-foot-high walls dubbed “peace lines” demarcate working-class districts into, on one side of the fortifications, Catholic neighborhoods marked with the green, white and orange of the Irish tricolor and, on the other side, Protestant areas bearing the red, white and blue of the Union Jack.
In the generation since the 1998 peace agreement made Northern Ireland a more attractive place to live, the lowest-rent properties on both sides of those security barriers have become home for a quickly growing population of newcomers from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa.
Because the Irish nationalist population is growing and the Protestant unionist community is declining in these so-called “interface areas,” non-white asylum seekers are more likely to find housing on the Protestant side of the fence.
In the case of Monday night’s knife attack, it happened near one of those “interface areas” but on the Catholic side of the divide, where immigrants often say they feel marginally safer.
The sense of history repeating itself, with age-old tensions confronting new demographic shifts, is not lost on Paul Doherty, a councilman representing Catholic west Belfast.
“I grew up hearing stories of my own community in west Belfast who were burnt out of their homes on Bombay Street in the 1960s,” Doherty said, referring to the spot where the first “peace line” was born. “People still carry trauma from those days. We know where that road leads. We can’t allow reckless mobs in 2026 to repeat some of the darkest chapters of our past. That’s what it felt like last night.”
