Irish News, 17. September 2001

These children are not barter

PLATFORM
By Gerry Kelly
Sinn Fein


Since the start of the new school term the entire globe has watched a single image of Belfast. In every corner of the world, translated into every language, people witnessed what can only be described as one of the most frightening and depressing episodes of the last 30 years.

School girls between the ages of four and 11 and their parents were physically and verbally assaulted, and made to run a gauntlet of sectarian hatred and violence. Stones, bottles, curses, whistles, air horns and a blast bomb were the ammunition.

The objective? To harass, intimidate, injure and, in the case of the UDA, kill Catholic school children and their parents. And if anyone was in any doubt about this, the UDA, acting under the name of the Red Hand Defenders, issued death threats.

After two weeks of sectarian hatred and violence on the Ardoyne Road, much of it orchestrated by loyalist paramilitaries and defended by some within the unionist political establishment, we have been promised that this morning the blockade will continue. Once again Catholic children have to run a gauntlet of bigotry in an attempt to access their school.

None of what is happening on the Ardoyne Road is very complicated. It doesn’t take long sociological or economic explanations. It is not a puzzle looking to be solved. It is a clear and simple case of sectarianism in its rawest and most unpalatable form.

The blockade against the children is legally, politically, and ethically wrong.

There is no argument which can be used to justify it, and no explanation which can be sought to underpin it. Protesting against school children and their parents is wrong.

If all politicians recognised this, then they should call on the blockade to end. Anything short of that lets the bigots off the hook and provides them with political cover for their attacks on young children. This is a matter of protecting the human and civil rights of children. Such rights are paramount.

This blockade began at the end of the last school term. Following a week in which the parents and their children were prevented from entering their school through the front door by loyalists and the RUC, an
11-week summer holiday period ensued. During this time a number of different channels were opened up between the nationalist and loyalist communities in an attempt to resolve the dispute.

Parents engaged with loyalist residents through the Mediation Network for seven weeks. Cross-community contact was initiated between community workers from Ardoyne and residents in Glenbryn. Sinn Fein used our contacts in the loyalist community for five weeks in an attempt to produce some resolution.

In the end, all of these efforts failed, although not for lack of sincerity or accommodation on the nationalist and republican side.

Nonetheless, despite the constant failure of discussions to produce a solution, and despite a series of attacks on the children and parents in Ardoyne, all sections of the nationalist community haveput on record their willingness to enter into dialogue as a matter of urgency. Community leaders, parents, political representatives and ordinary residents are all saying the same thing – dialogue is the only way forward to end the blockade and must resume sooner rather than later.

Many unionist politicians have sought to justify the blockade by referring to the levels of deprivation, social exclusion and marginalisation in Glenbryn.

This, coupled with allegations of a continuous assault by republicans on the homes and people of this community, was offered as an excuse for verbal and physical attacks on young children.

We have been told that the violence was wrong but it was a product of a siege mentality, of a community under attack, in decline, in retreat.

The arguments offered by unionist politicians from all parties not only side-stepped the issue of the blockade on the children and their parents, but actually created the space within which the blockade and indeed violence could continue.

While unionist politicians have every right to raise and seek to debate the broader social, political, economic and cultural conditions of life for all sections of the community in north Belfast, doing so in an attempt to justify or excuse attacks on young children is wrong. Furthermore it undermines their own case and demonstrates to the world that they are indeed using school children as bargaining chips and leverage in an attempt to seek the resolution of other issues.

The one indisputable fact in all of this is that school children from Holy Cross are not and cannot be seen as responsible for any issue of concern to residents in Glenbryn.

The blockade is not some tit-for-tat sectarian dispute, involving two warring communities.

This is about grown adults mounting a violent blockade against young children and their parents.

There is no equivalence between what the children are experiencing and the problems experienced by residents of Glenbryn. These are two separate matters. Only those seeking to justify the blockade are mixing them together.

The blockade on Holy Cross primary school is wrong and must end.

All politicians must support this call.

There is no right to protest against children. There is no right to harass children. Nor is there any right to use children as political hostages in arguments about other political or economic issues.

2001 is the European Year of the Child.

The European Convention of Human Rights clearly places the rights of children above any right to protest. The Holy Cross blockade is in breach of the European Convention and is thus illegal.

It is now up to unionist and British politicians to recognise this legal fact and to use their influence to end this unjustifiable blockade at Holy Cross girls’ primary school.

I started to write this article before the horrendous attacks in America.

It is true to say that these attacks have affected every Irish person. People could be forgiven for thinking that what is happening to the children of Holy Cross is minuscule by comparison.

The American attacks cannot become a yardstick. Instead of the UDA/RHD trying to de-escalate the situation, they have attempted to murder a Catholic taxi driver and have threatened all other Catholic taxi drivers in north Belfast.

This makes the task of putting public pressure on the UDA to remove such death threats to taxi drivers, parents and children all the more urgent.

We wait to hear the voices of the British government, and all the unionist and loyalist public representatives, who have been ambivalent or silent up until now.