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Battle for jobs feeds Northern Ireland xenophobia
Tue Aug 18, 2009 8:48pm EDT
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By Andras Gergely
BELFAST (Reuters) - "Foreign bodies" coming from eastern Europe to take jobs are a new adversary for Alan Skey, more than a decade after Northern Ireland's peace deal secured the former militant's release from the Maze prison.
Standing next to the mural of a masked gunman that marks the entry to "South Belfast's loyalist heartland," Skey -- who fought to keep the province a part of the United Kingdom -- praised the peace process and revealed a new raw nerve.
"We can't work in our own city. We didn't take up the struggle for that," said Skey, who spent 16 years in jail before being freed under the terms of the 1998 Good Friday peace deal.
"I took up the struggle to keep that British flag flying. Now loyalists and republicans are oppressed in their own country due to foreign bodies."
Historically, it was economic migrants from the largely Catholic Republic of Ireland who stirred up sectarian trouble in Protestant commmunities. The south, a "Celtic Tiger" until the credit crunch kicked in, is now the euro zone's weakest link.
Nonetheless, the "foreign bodies" Skey refers to are workers mainly from Poland, Lithuania and Romania. His views are more radical than most, but nearly 50 percent of those polled in one survey believed migrant workers take jobs away from people born in Northern Ireland.
Of the 1,215 adults interviewed between October 1, 2008 and February 27, 2009 for the Queen's University Belfast and the University of Ulster, only 38 percent disagreed with that assertion: 46 percent were in favor.
Northern Ireland's racist underbelly has been on show this summer.
Gangs of youths, some giving the Nazi salute, forced around 100 Romanians of Roma ethnicity, including a newborn baby, to flee their Belfast homes in June.
That evoked eastern European scenes of intensifying violence against the Roma, including attacks with petrol bombs, hand grenades and rifles in Hungary that have killed half a dozen people in the last 18 months, with sporadic violence elsewhere.
After rival fans clashed at a soccer match between Poland and Northern Ireland in March, around 40 people were forced to leave a working class Loyalist area of Belfast due to intimidation.
The 1998 peace deal has reduced the sectarian violence that killed 3,600 people from the 1970s, and the biggest paramilitary groups on both the pro-British Protestant and pro-Irish Catholic sides have dumped their arms.
But racist attacks have become, in the words of Belfast city's mayor Naomi Long, the province's "stain of shame."
"Really sectarianism and racism are very similar, twin evils of prejudice and intolerance," said Hong Kong-born Anna Lo, the only member of the Northern Ireland Assembly from an ethnic minority, who represents the Belfast South constituency.
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