Belfast attack suspect named as he appears in court charged with attempted murder

Every city is a palimpsest, in the pattern of whose streets and buildings, stories etched in the past remain legible. Even when there has been a careful attempt to forget and obscure, the careful observer might note a plinth minus a statue, or a temple converted to secular use. In Belfast, a city where bluntness is prized as a badge of honesty, nobody tries to obscure what has gone before: the past shouts its obsessions into the ear of the present in 20-foot gable-end murals and slogans on its notorious “peace walls”.

On Monday night, Hadi Alodid, a Sudanese refugee hitherto of no importance, managed to rivet Belfast’s global future onto the conflicts of its past when he hacked at the head of Stephen Ogilvie, while a neighbour recorded on her mobile phone. Alodid can scarcely have known that his attack was taking place at The Troubles’ epicentre: in North Belfast’s Byzantine sectarian geography, Kinnaird Avenue sits in a ribbon of firmly Irish Republican territory connecting the Sinn Féin heartlands of the New Lodge and Ardoyne. Barely 400 metres away, guarded by walls and fences disguised as urban parks, sits the “interface” with Ulster Loyalism’s Haram al-Sharif, the Shankill. Duncairn Avenue, where Alodid lived, just round the corner from the attack, runs into the junction of the Antrim Road and the New Lodge Road, the most dangerous spot of all in Northern Ireland’s lengthy civil conflict. In the Seventies, the notorious Shankill Butchers gangs cruised these streets in the middle of the night, looking for Catholics walking home from parties, drunk, so they could kidnap them and take them back to the Shankill to torture them before murdering them.

When the Belfast Telegraph ’s Suzanne Breen wrote an article reminding readers of that history, where violent knife attacks were entirely home grown, she was savaged by overseas online Right-wingers for arrant cuckery. But one cannot understand the pattern of this week’s events in Belfast — where, after a brutal assault by a Muslim immigrant in one of the city’s Republican strongholds, Republican neighbourhoods remained quiet while Loyalist districts saw violent protests and a seemingly well-orchestrated campaign in which immigrant families were burned out — without understanding the city’s recent past, and how it has led the leaderships of each major community to interpret the growth of the city’s ethnic minority population differently.

To what extent the leaders of Northern Ireland’s Nationalists can continue to take an almost entirely unfinessed pro-immigration line, and how the region’s small but rapidly growing ethnic minority communities will engage with its Nationalist and Unionist traditions, are two of the biggest imponderables in the region’s politics. Northern Ireland’s ethnic minority populations may be small, but as the demographic balance of the region’s indigenous groups sits on a knife-edge, and The Troubles refuse to recede entirely into the past, their views and contributions may be decisive to the region’s future. Indeed, the story of Kinnaird Avenue, the street where the attack took place, is itself revealing of Belfast’s inability to put The Troubles behind it. The street was only built in the 2010s, long after The Troubles ended in fits and starts in the mid-to-late Nineties, yet it is perceived as Republican territory.

It sits on part of the Girdwood army barracks site, a 20-minute stroll from the voguish downtown warehouse conversions of the Cathedral Quarter . When it was decommissioned in 2005, there was hope that it would provide desegregated housing and shared leisure facilities, acting as a bridge between the Loyalist Greater Shankill and Republican New Lodge areas — the beginning of the end of the Balkanisation of North Belfast.

This hope was in vain. In the end, only 60 houses , less than a third of the planned number, were completed in this area of significant need. Scuppering the hope were two demographic issues that remain acute in post-Troubles North Belfast: Unionist decline and the paranoia this engenders, and the desperate housing shortage and overcrowding among Nationalists. Sectarian boundaries were fixed in the early Seventies, and while people from both communities were intimidated from areas where they were in the local minority, Catholics were the bigger losers. Gradually, mixed areas, often the better-off ones, tended to become predominantly Nationalist as Catholics who moved up the social scale in the wake of anti-discrimination laws sought out available local housing.

‘This is the third summer in a row when Northern Ireland has witnessed a sudden outbreak of intense racist intimidation.’

A second extensive round of mutual intimidation took place in the late Nineties, as Northern Ireland was supposedly welcoming the new peace. I remember vividly canvassing in North Belfast for the Alliance Party in the 1998 Assembly elections which immediately followed the Good Friday Agreement. On perhaps a dozen occasions I…