Sectarianism in the North is getting worse

Over a decade after the Good Friday Agreement, there are now almost twice as many “peace lines” in Belfast than there were when it was signed.
Last year saw over 1,500 sectarian incidents reported to the police; this was 50% more than the number of racist attacks in the same year. While the huge level of racist attacks rightly provoked a great deal of concern, the growth in sectarianism didn’t.
This year, things are even worse. By September of this year, there had already been as many sectarian attacks reported to police as in the entire 2008.
Coleraine town saw more than a trebling of sectarian attacks in the five months between April and September. The beating to death of catholic community worker Kevin McDaid was the result of one of those attacks.
Levels of sectarianism in the town are so bad that the principals of two local primary schools wrote to the First Minister and the deputy First Minister to seek help for their children. The Office of the First Minister and the deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) is charged with ensuring equality and ‘a shared future’ in the North.
 The principals were most disappointed with the waffly reply they received. They wrote again to OFMDFM saying:
Our children are under threat, suffering emotionally and physically… Who else can we appeal to for help before this state of affairs gets even worse and another generation is tainted with bitterness and regret?
The DUP and Sinn Fein cannot address the question of sectarianism because they each need the competition between communities to continue if they are to stay in power.
During the 1998 referendum on the Belfast Agreement, socialists were condemned for refusing to support it. We were against paramilitarism, so why did we not support the Agreement? We were clear then that it was precisely because the Agreement did nothing to tackle sectarianism – in fact, was likely to make matters worse – that we were against the Agreement.
Unfortunately, things have become even worse than we had feared they would.
As  politicians fight ‘resource wars’ for their rival communities and turn every political debate into a ‘them’ and ‘us’ argument,  it’s no wonder those communities still see the other side as the enemy.’

That’s why strikes like the Postal Workers dispute are so important in the North. They show that the real ‘them’ and ‘us’ is about class, not community.

As poverty gets worse in both communities, we need more strikes and campaigns where Protestant and Catholic working class people come together to challenge the rule of the sectarian parties running Stormont.