no time for snobs

Posted by Jim on July 14, 2025

THE BELFAST TELEGRAPH:

I’ve no time for snobs who talk down to working class, but how mad does bonfire asbestos row make us look to rest of world?

Allison Morris

Today at 01:59

Who would have known that the buzzword from this year’s eleventh night bonfires would be “asbestos”.

Those running social media accounts that transferred their sectarianism to racism around the same time as the hate riots last August, are now seemingly experts on the dangerous building material found at the site of a pyre just off the Donegall Road in south Belfast.

Asbestos was once commonly used in insulation, roofing and flooring. It wouldn’t be until the late Nineties that it was banned after research showed its fibres led to serious health problems, including cancer.

I have been covering bonfires and parades for over 20 years and in that time I have pretty much seen it all — the good, the bad and the potentially life-threatening consequences of the fires which form part of the loyalist tradition.

I’ve written about dozens of contentious pyres, visited sites where the, mainly young men, would have welcomed us and shown the media around, proud of their handiwork.

And others, when I’ve been threatened with violence because I kick with the other foot.

When I was growing up we would have had a bonfire at the top of our street on August 8, the night before the anniversary of internment.

It wasn’t one of the enormous, gravity-defying jenga-style pallet structures loyalists build, but old doors, furniture, mattresses and tyres.

There wasn’t as much — in fact any — awareness at the time of the dangers of burning hazardous materials. After all, it was the Seventies in west Belfast and there were 100 other ways to potentially die young that didn’t involve burning a tractor tyre.

If you take a look through Lost Lives, the book that documents every man, woman and child murdered here during the Troubles, you’ll see a pattern in and around August 8 and 9 every year in the Seventies and early Eighties.

People were dying, being shot in street disorder and riots associated with that time.

We don’t have bonfires anymore. The Divis and New Lodge ones, magnets for drugs and antisocial behaviour, haven’t taken place in years, thank goodness.

There is a bonfire in Derry in August that often ends in rioting and the arrest of young people. It’s for the people of that city to call time on this.

In west Belfast the success of Feile an Phobail was a game changer — the young people will dance in Falls Park to DJs whose names I’m far too old to recognise on August 8, and long may that newish tradition continue.

It could be argued republicans were not as attached to bonfires as loyalists, who see it as part of a tradition to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. And that’s fine, difference is a good thing.

The majority of the 300 fires lit on the eleventh night pass without incident, most of them small to medium-sized structures attended by families.

But there are always the predictable ones that cause issues every year.

Moygashel, with that gruesome image of a boat full of brown-skinned mannequins dressed to look like migrants, has to the be the worst I’ve seen in my time. The ‘Irish patriots’ — the growing far right across the border — thought they’d found their kindred spirits among the Ulster loyalists.

The ‘Coolock says no’ squad’s night in the Royal Bar in Sandy Row last year led them to believe they were all ‘besties’, united in a joint cause of hating anyone who looks or sounds a bit foreign.

The boat of migrant effigies also included a large tricolour, just to remind the naive racists in the south that they may not be public enemy number one anymore, but they do come a close second.

Despite all the warnings, the south Belfast bonfire went ahead.

We won’t know how many people breathed in deadly asbestos fibres — it’ll be a wee surprise for them during a lung scan in 20 years’ time when the fun of the bonfire is long forgotten. What it does show is just how dysfunctional this place is, how insane we must look to outsiders.

I’m not a big fan of the snobby ‘school prefect’ types preaching to working-class communities about how they should act and behave.

I wouldn’t have taken kindly to them wafting in and out of my community 20 or 30 years ago, patronising the people.

But I do know that each generation should strive for better, should hope that the children who come behind them enjoy more opportunities and a better life than they did.

There are victories like your child winning a medal at sports day, scoring a goal, or being the first generation accepted to university, maybe even securing a good job and getting on the property ladder.

What isn’t a win, what isn’t a big victory for loyalism, is ignoring all the warnings to have a bonfire in a waste ground littered with asbestos.