Belfast is burning again, and the political class should not look away

Petrol bombs arcing through the June air over Sandy Row, masked youths clashing with police lines, and the cordon stretched thin across an interface that the peace process was supposed to make redundant. Belfast is burning again, and the news cycle has already moved on to fixtures lists and trade deals, leaving the residents of Belfast to absorb the latest flare-up with the weary recognition of people who have seen this film before and know exactly how many sequels it gets.

The temptation in any western capital is to read Northern Ireland's recurring street violence through the familiar sectarian key: flags, bonfires, marching season, ancient grudges. It is a tidy explanation, and it is also the explanation that lets the political class off the hook. The structural problem is not the tribal logic that draws young people onto interfaces in June. It is the institutional vacuum that guarantees those young people will meet each other there again next summer, and the summer after that, until someone in Stormont or Westminster treats the underlying condition rather than the recurring symptom.

What actually happens on the ground

The pattern is consistent enough to be plotted on a calendar. Tensions rise as the marching season approaches, the Parades Commission adjudicates on routes it never wanted to police, the Orange Order objects, nationalist residents object to the objections, and the interface becomes the place where arguments are settled with masonry. Police Service of Northern Ireland officers, still operating under the post-Good Friday arrangement that depends on cross-community consent, find themselves holding a line that nobody they are protecting voted for them to hold. The arrests are low in number and high in visibility. The courts process the small fry and the political class issues the same communique it issued last year, slightly retyped.

Northern Ireland's distinctive feature is that this slow-motion crisis is now run by a political class that has, in practice, stopped turning up to work. The devolved institutions at Stormont have spent more of the past decade in suspension, in collapse, or in the long purgatory of negotiation-about-negotiation than they have in active government. The vacuum is not new, but it is being tested in ways that the 1998 settlement did not anticipate: organised ritualised intimidation, online radicalisation of teenagers who have no memory of the actual conflict, and the steady attrition of any institution that previously translated anger on the streets into policy in a debating chamber.

The counter-narrative, and why it does not hold

The comforting read, advanced whenever these episodes break, is that Northern Ireland's violence is essentially performative, choreographed, contained. Rioters know which streets they can burn, police know which lines they will hold, and the whole thing ends after a few news cycles with a tidy line about mutual restraint. There is enough evidence in the long history of interface policing to make that read plausible. It is also the read that has allowed every British and Irish government since 1998 to treat each recurrence as exceptional rather than structural, and to underfund the very institutions that would make it false.

The more honest view is that the performative framing was always partly true and is now eroding. Demographic churn on both sides of the peace line means a growing share of the people doing the throwing were not alive when the IRA and the UVW were operational entities on the evening news. Their templates are inherited; their grievances are not the same; and the institutions that used to channel inherited grievance into elective politics are weaker than at any point since the ceasefires. The Policing Board's reduced oversight, the persistent questions about the Historical Investigations Unit, and the long gap in justice reform are not background colour. They are the conditions under which the next escalation finds less friction in its path than the last one did.

Why Westminster and Dublin should not look away

The Stormont impasse is not a local story. It is the long-running subtext of every question about the Irish border, every negotiation over the Windsor Framework, every reassessment of British and Irish defence cooperation. A settlement that works because everyone in the room remembers what the alternative looked like is a settlement whose sell-by date is the second generation that does not. That generation is now old enough to riot.

The British-Irish bilateral relationship has done the heavy diplomatic lifting on everything from legacy investigations to trade, and the two governments now have an opportunity, if they have the appetite, to use the current crisis as the prompt for an overdue conversation about how the institutions of the 1998 settlement will function in a Northern Ireland that is demographically, economically, and psychologically no longer the one that agreed to them. The alternative is a familiar one: another summer of communiques, another winter of quiet, and another round of headlines in two years' time when the same scenes replay on the same streets.

Belfast is not burning because the past will not let go. It is burning because the present has not yet been built. The political class in London, Dublin and Belfast knows which it is; it has known for some time. The only question left is whether the cost of admitting it is judged higher than the cost of another summer of fire engines.