Northern Ireland

Source: Times

At the end of a potholed road lies the village to which a hundred Romanians are returning after fleeing racist attacks in Belfast and where their fear will soon turn to despair.

Twenty hours of journey time separate Belfast, via Dublin and Budapest, from Batar but, surveying the medieval conditions in which the Roma live here, one might do better to take as a measure of distance not years, nor even decades, but centuries.

On the farthermost margins of the European Union a man’s legs and arms were smeared with dirt as he toiled to make bricks from straw and mud to build another room on his home. It was, he said, to provide somewhere to sleep for the dozens of naked children — some of them malnourished, all of them filthy — who were running and swooping gleefully through the scattered rubbish.

Elderly couples sat on upturned buckets and tired old horses pulled carts while older children rode scrap-salvaged bicycles. No sanitation, a rudimentary electricity supply and the background hum of hunger and hopelessness completed the picture.

Romanians evacuating to the local Leisure Centre

On a piece of waste ground poisoned by toxic chemicals, a group of teenagers were indulging in an age-old ritual this week.

They were making a giant bonfire from old crates and timber stolen from derelict buildings.

When a huge pyre had been erected, the youths retired to admire their work from the ‘den’, a hut they’d built for their gang from scrap and furnished with sofas found dumped on the street.

There were even broken venetian blinds at the front of the hut, which twisted and moaned in the wind.

Next month, on July 11, the night before the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne — when Protestant King William of Orange defeated the Catholic King James in 1690 — the bonfire will be set ablaze.

Along with hundreds of other bonfires lit across Belfast that night, the flames are meant to remind the Catholic majority of that historic Protestant victory, and serve warning that Loyalists will still fight fire with fire if any attempt is made to separate them from British rule.