Michael Magee

Palestinian journalist plays with a little baby boy who survived an lsraeli airstrike, Gaza.

It’s a wonderful morning to shoot 63 in Northern Ireland

remember the burning of Bombay Street remember that over 3000 catholic families were forced out of their homes / made homeless between August and September 1969 remember how the Northern state was initiated and sustained by pogroms against the minority Catholic population (1920-22, 1935, and 1969) and remember how those pogroms were orchestrated and encouraged by unionist politicians who used Catholics as scapegoats for the rampant poverty and social inequality suffered by working-class people across the six counties mostly importantly, remember how the broader political and media establishment spent the best part of 50 years (leading up to the beginning of the conflict) portraying Catholics as belligerent, distrustful, lazy, base, and perpetuated the idea that our place in society was conditional, provided our parents and grandparents were accepting of and subservient to the structures of power that oppressed and discriminated against them in every facet of their daily lives nothing about what we’re seeing in Ballymena and other areas across the six counties has anything to do with protecting women and children, it’s the natural outgrowth of a reactionary ideology based on fear and hatred of ‘the other’ that fear has been redirected away from Catholics (for the most part) and on to people of colour, and the blatant racism we’re seeing isn’t happening in isolation, it has been stoked and facilitated by figures within loyalism and unionism (and the media, under the cloak of ‘genuine concerns’) and compounded by far-right agitators across the 32 counties who have preyed upon and exploited peoples fears and insecurities in the face of deepening inequality (important to keep in mind that since covid, we’ve seen the biggest transference of wealth from the poorest to the richest people in society in decades) all this is to say we have a responsibility towards our history and understanding the structural forces behind the racist attacks we’re seeing today our neighbours are our neighbours, they are our people regardless of the colour of their skin or their religious beliefs, and they have as much a right to be here and make lives for themselves as anybody else