[dofm]

Sectarian divides are always complex if you’re the outsider, I think. Like the Troubles in Ireland, or Hutus vs Tutsis in Rwanda, or Pol Pot’s purges: from the outside it is like, how can they be so immediately sure who is who? Whereas on the inside, your membership of one or other group is always obvious: it’s a socially indelible distinction used to doom people to one or the other, and the smallness of the distinction is often the point. (MAGA vs America First could end up like this)

I used to think that people on the mainland like me could never fully and instinctively understand who was who (and why) in the Troubles. But this week, the problems in Belfast, it is somehow instinctively obvious which side of the old sectarian divide the energy behind that violence is coming from, even though arguably the so-called “justification” (immigration) affects both sides of the Troubles divide more or less equally and the supposed provocation (actually more or less a pretext) happened in an area associated with the other one.

I think most people here in the UK just knew, immediately, from the tone of it.