Observe the sons of Ulster marching to Poland

For the occasion, Frank Higgins, who is in his fifties, has donned the Royal Irish Regiment’s green uniform, complete with beret and pompom. He places the first chrysanthemum on the tomb of the First World War Polish Legionaires. "Piłsudski, do you remember who Piłsudski was?" [Marshal Józef Piłsudski, founder the independent Polish state in the aftermath of the First World War] Everyone answers in the affirmative, as though the question was about the Queen of England. Several of the younger members of the group are sporting conspicuous tattoos — among them Stuart, an electrician who was moved to tears by the tombs the Polish aviators on a visit to the Rakowicki Cemetery in Cracow.

Then there is Mark, who works for an aerospace company and is also a member of the Red Hand Commando, a Belfast paramilitary group which officially disarmed a year ago. In the course of a visit to Wawel Castle, an excursion to the Wieliczka salt mines and chats with Polish students in the pubs in Cracow, Mark has been thinking about how to help the 30,000 Polish immigrants in Northern Ireland to avoid the threat of serious trouble. It would not take much for the situation to spin out of control, especially since most of the Poles have chosen to live in the staunchly Protestant neighbourhoods of East Belfast, where, as Aleksandra Łojek-Magdziarz, of the Polish Association of Belfast explains, "the rents are lower than they are in the Catholic areas."

In the spring of 2009, after a football match between Northern Ireland and Poland, hooligans who had traveled to the game from Poland, and also from Wales and Scotland, went on the rampage in downtown Belfast. By way of reprisal, groups of Protestant paramilitaries destroyed 150 Polish homes. "Most of the victims were innocent Polish families," confirms Maciej Bator, director of the Polish Association of Northern Ireland. However, he also acknowledges that the Polish should accept some share of the blame for the conflict with the Protestant community. Most of the time, the trouble is caused by parties where the drinking gets out of hand.

Memories of the “Peace Line”

The worst of it is that the Poles are not aware of the risks they run if they fail to observe the unwritten rules of tougher neighbourhoods in Northern Ireland. "When there is a problem in Belfast, the locals do not call the town hall or the police, they call on the paramilitaries who disarmed only a few years ago," explains Kacper Rękawek, a political scientist at the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities,

and the author of several publications on the conflict in Northern Ireland.

It is not unusual for groups of men sometimes armed with Kalashnikovs to barge into Polish parties and give the migrants 24 hours to find a new apartment. But Protestant neighbours are not only bothered by noise on Saturday nights. "Although large numbers of Poles began to arrive in the city six years ago, many of them still cannot speak English and are unable to respond to polite conversation," remarks Maciej Bator.

Sitting in a Cracow restaurant before a plate of fried beetroot, a dish which he secretly dislikes, Frank Higgins dreams of a new era of tolerance in Belfast. When he was 9 years old, a “Peace Line” between the Protestant Shankhill and Catholic Falls Road was built, a 5-metre high wall of reinforced concrete topped with a wire fence intended to prevent people from throwing petrol bombs. Stretching over three kilometres, the barrier and the many others like it in the city, are an enduring legacy of decades of violence in Belfast.

“I was to blame for all the troubles of the world”

The Falls Road side of the barrier was under the control of the IRA, while command of the Shankill Road side was shared between the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Red Hand Commando — it was his involvement with this last group that led Mark to become an informal community leader in his hometown of Carrickfergus, a Loyalist stronghold, which is now home to many Polish Catholics.

In all likelihood, Mark would have never set foot in Poland if Frank Higgins had not seen the connection between the barbed wire in Belfast and the fences of Auschwitz. Having left the army, the former commando took a job in the Harland & Wolff shipyard and devoted his free time to the study of the history of the Holocaust.

When the Troubles — at least on paper — came to an end in Northern Ireland, he began to wonder about the possibility of sending Belfast paramilitaries to visit Auschwitz: as he explains, "so they could see the consequences of racism in its purest form for themselves."

The project began to take shape when Polish migrants started to arrive in Ulster. "I immediately realised that they could potentially fall victim to racism in Northern Ireland," explains Frank. And he was not wrong. Says Darius from Poland, a former supermarket employee who now works as a security guard, "I was to blame for all the troubles of the world, and especially for the fact that Polish Catholics were taking jobs and homes from Ulster Protestants. I even heard people say that we were responsible for the economic downturn in Northern Ireland."

Doing away with anti-Polish prejudices

So it was for people like Mark (who believed that people in Poland were dying of hunger) and Darius (who until a few years ago had never thought that there might be any difference between his Belfast neighbours and the people in Dublin) that Frank Higgins created the Thin Edge of the Wedge programme. Before long, he had obtained support from the European Union, which provided funding, as well as the Polish Association of Northern Ireland, the academics of Jagiellonian University in Cracow, the Cracow Dialogue Club, and a group of Polish MPs.

The programme which is now in operation offers 12-week training courses on the history of racism, Polish history, and psychology workshops to former leaders of Ulster paramilitary groups and ex-prisoners (including some who were convicted of terrorist offences), who continue to carry the most clout in the Belfast neighbourhoods. Over the next three years, Frank plans to train several hundred people from this target group.

Alexandra Łojek-Magdziarz has nothing but praise for the programme: "It was a stroke of genius. Frank has succeeded in doing something no one thought was possible: imagine offering people who are full of anti-Polish prejudice an opportunity to actually visit the country, and turning them into fervent admirers of Poland."

Liens:

Przekrój article (pl)

http://www.przekroj.pl/wydarzenia_kraj_artykul,7841.html

Thin Edge of the Wedge (en)

http://www.thethinendofthewedge.com/

Frank Higgins’ blog (en)

http://www.thethinendofthewedge.com/franks-blog

The Polish Association of Northern Ireland (en)

http://www.polishassociation.org/www/polish/en/index.php

Author profile

Before joining the staff of the weekly Przekrój, Anna Szulc worked as a journalist for the TVP 1 and TVP Polonia television channels.

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Celtic tiger laid low by Estonia’s turkey pluckers

“Are Estonians partly to blame for the crisis in Ireland?” wonders Postimees. The Estonian daily believes the term “to blame” might be a little strong, but there is a link nonetheless. Natives of the Baltic state were among the many workers from Central and Eastern Europe who traveled west to take advantage of the Irish “economic miracle” and the many well-paid jobs that were on offer on farms and in the building industry.

The wave of foreign workers arriving in the country created a need for more housing, and the Irish borrowed extensively to invest in buildings that were subsequently rented to the migrants. “And that is how our ‘turkey pluckers’ inadvertently contributed to the problems that are plaguing the Irish today,” remarks Postimees.