Did you know there was considerable rioting in south Belfast yesterday? Petrol and paint bombs were hurled and vehicles belonging to the PSNI were damaged.
Chief Superintendent Jeremy Lindsay, District Commander for Belfast, said: “Thankfully, no injuries to police officers or the public were reported. However, this was a particularly protracted period of public disorder lasting into the early hours of today.
Why do you think this violence occurred? The usual description of it is “mindless” – that is to say, the authorities can’t come up with a reason for it.
But there was a reason – maybe not a reason we’d like but a reason none the less.
Most of us have trouble remembering when we were young, much less how we felt when we were young. But those of us who do remember will know that violence is rarely mindless.
That’s because violence is exciting, fascinating. It may be immoral and cruel as well, but it is all-absorbing. Why do you think that crowds gather to peer at the scene of a car crash? Why do so many movies and games involve loads of explosions, bodies flying through the air? Because people like watching violence.
That’s what made the opening scenes in the movie Saving Private Ryan so compelling. We’d just had time to get to know the personality of some of the soldiers in the landing craft when bullets whizzed and hit them and they died in the water. When I was a boarder in St Columb’s, the words “Fight! There’s a fight!” would bring us sprinting from every corner to the scene of the scuffle, desperate to see something that would break the boredom of the day. In the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth get into a no-holds-barred brawl and one of Bridget’s friends runs to restaurants and bars, shouting from the doorway “Fight! Fight! There’s a fight!”, his words tumbling out, a big grin in his face.
You may think that watching violence on TV gives you a ring-side street. Not so. The difference between watching a riot on TV and watching a riot in real life, with stones and bottles flying and bouncing off walls, off the ground, off people – there is a dimension to the real thing that is scary and totally absorbing.
Some of the young people rioting in south Belfast last night may have done it for a thought-out political reason. For most of them, a break in the tedium of a mid-summer evening was reason enough. Mindless my arse.
Pat and Jude shouldn’t beat themselves up too much. A lot of (Irish) people predicted ultimate victory for England, but it was the football equivalence of throwing salt over your shoulder. England had been so jammy in their earlier games there was a feeling of the devil’s good to his own. If we weren’t natives of the Emerald Isle we would see our our neighbours in a very different light. As soon as they run into an elite side they struggle. Being jammy only takes you so far.
Very good jude
“If we weren’t natives of the Emerald Isle we would see our our neighbours in a very different light…”
Not so sure about that, I watched the 19966:World Cup Final in a Youth Hostel outside Barcelona.There were about 10 different Nationalities there and everyone out from the English were cheering for Germany ..