In Belfast

Since Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK government last month, more than seven hundred people have been arrested on suspicion of supporting the group. On Sunday, hundreds of demonstrators gathered in front of Belfast City Hall to ‘Defend the Right to Protest’.

At a previous protest in Belfast, on 9 August, 74-year-old Máire Mhic an Fhailí was arrested for wearing a Palestine Action T-shirt. She’d given the police her name and address in Irish and been told she had to give them in English (she didn’t). An attendee who’d given his details in English received a caution. The 2022 Language Act gives Irish theoretical parity with English in Northern Ireland; the Police Service of Northern Ireland is supposedly non-sectarian, unlike the Royal Ulster Constabulary it replaced in 2001. But Palestine solidarity is strong in Belfast in part because Catholics and Irish-speakers are still marginalised.

On Sunday, 17 August, there were no arrests at the protest itself, though the police are currently investigating possible offences. There were some direct expressions of support through T-shirts and signs, as well as winking variations (‘I support Plasticine Action’).

Counter-demonstrators were met with chants of ‘Racist scum, off our streets’ and calls linking them to the Ulster Volunteer Force. The UVF has been proscribed as a terrorist group for decades, because of offences including the murder of civilians (rather than spray-painting planes). UVF iconography remains on open display in parts of Belfast.

Not long after speeches began, applause rumbled from down the road. Dozens of cyclists were arriving, having biked the hundred miles from Dublin (I’d made the same journey by train) over the weekend to raise funds for Gaza. The Palestinian speaker who had been detailing the centuries of resistance – ‘And always we prevailed’ – ran out with everyone else onto the road and embraced the cyclists.

Chichester Street was blocked, leaving a cruise ship shuttle bus and the 9C in limbo. A policeman proclaimed through a megaphone that this was unlawful. ‘Slaughtering children is unlawful!’ came the swift reply.

The British Empire considered Ireland’s 1847-52 Great Famine to be a natural disaster rather than opportunistic ethnic cleansing. ‘It is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people,’ said Charles Trevelyan, assistant secretary to Her Majesty’s Treasury, in 1847, a year before the British knighted him for overseeing famine ‘relief’. There aren’t separate words for famine and starvation in Irish: an gorta covers both. To the English-speakers shaping colonial policy, it was important to have one word implying intent and another evading it. To the Irish-speakers dying from that policy, the difference was less material.

What’s happening in Gaza is an even clearer case of public figures with command authority declaring their intention to blockade food and then doing so. It is a mystery how anyone can call it a ‘humanitarian disaster’ rather than a genocide. When cowards insist on obfuscating still, the Irish hear the parallels.

‘We are only too familiar with [the UK’s] practices to resist terrorism,’ said a speaker in Belfast on Sunday. The British army has still faced no real accountability for murdering civilians on the pretext that they might be affiliated with the IRA. The Free State that I took the train up from is viewed by Republicans as a partitionist betrayal that abandoned the North.

Virtually everything the UK does regarding Palestine makes it the Republic’s ugly friend: almost anyone would look good standing next to it. But Dublin is hideous in its own right. We let US military planes that may be carrying arms to Israel pass through Shannon Airport without inspection. We have spent seven years failing to pass an Occupied Territories Bill that would impose sanctions on ‘illegal settlements in territories deemed occupied under international law’, even in the latest watered-down version that would only apply to goods, not services. Our Central Bank grants regulatory approval to Israeli war bonds for sale across the EU. The bank is due to renew this approval on 2 September, and the matter has received little discussion in the Irish press.

The bonds were mentioned in half the speeches at the Belfast protest. ‘Mo náire iad,’ I found myself shouting: shame on them, our Central Bank. I’ve spoken at two protests against the bonds, one outside the bank itself and another outside the Department of Justice, without acknowledgment from those inside. It meant something to hear that we hadn’t been shouting into the ether.

The last speaker was Máire Mhic an Fhailí, the woman who’d been arrested the week before. ‘If you won’t uphold the law, we will uphold the law and dismantle your war machine,’ she vowed. A commotion came from the direction where the counter-demonstrators were still lurking. ‘Just ignore them,’ she said. Someone replied: ‘It’s the cyclists!’