FROM OUR IRONY EDITOR

“THE ENEMY OF my enemy is my friend.”

So said Hunkpapa Ruaneck, a former UDA brigadier from Belfast, as he raised an Irish Republican Tricolor over his neighborhood.

“There was a time when I would have burned this flag and all who carried it, but a common enemy has made them my allies. If you live long enough, as the say. *Tiocfaidh Ar La.”

Mr Ruaneck was taking part in what can only be described as a cross-community anti-migrant riot in Belfast, where people whose hatred for one another once could have melted diamond, whose eyes have not exchanged a glance for half a century, suddenly found themselves comrades in arms against a newly perceived threat. Even people from south of the Irish border were welcome.

“This is our island,” Mr Ruaneck insisted. “We may hate one another but that doesn’t give free licence to all and sundry to come here and hate along with us. Hatred is our birthright. I will not sell it cheaply.”

Sociologist Paul Demosthenes of Queens University says the sudden discovery of something in common between Belfast’s Catholics and Protestants, long visceral foes, and between Ulster Protestants and Southern Irish Catholics, equally disdainful adversaries, is a remarkable development. “To the see the Irish Tricolor and the British Union Jack being carried side by side amid the usual chaos of a Belfast riot, I can hardly describe the feeling. If only the London elite had known, that all they had to do to bring peace here was find a common enemy for the two communities to share, the Troubles could have ended in 1969.”

*Our Day Will Come – ED