Last Tuesday evening, as violence erupted in Belfast following protests over a knife attack, my wife received a phone call from the company providing care workers for her mother, who has Alzheimer's disease. During the call, a Romanian family with two children and two adults were being forced out of their home on the same street where my mother-in-law lives, in a predominantly loyalist housing estate on the outskirts of Belfast.
Fear and Evacuation
The care workers, new arrivals in Northern Ireland, were afraid of being attacked if they entered the area, but they eventually did so despite the threat. I heard from others that as the Romanian family was evacuated by police, a group of women linked arms and cheered, while men and boys clapped. Similar events occurred across Belfast on Tuesday and Wednesday, with people, including pregnant women, taken to police stations for safety.
On Thursday evening, my wife saw the family before they returned to Romania, as they picked through the remains of their life. Both parents worked and were not part of an 'alien culture' as described by some local politicians. Their children attended the same school as my daughter. They were not alien; they were one of us.
A Disturbing Response
When I explained this horrific situation to a lifelong friend in England with rightwing sympathies, outlining that the children were born in Northern Ireland and are British citizens, they replied by sending travel brochures for Romania and suggesting that children are resilient and will get over it.
I was reminded of Heinrich Heine's observation that where they burn books, eventually they will burn people. When society others a group because of their skin colour, we are in a very dangerous situation. But when people are indifferent to suffering, we are at a completely different level.
Name and address supplied
