Last week, the councillors of Belfast had to take a few hours out of their summer holiday in order to attend an emergency meeting of the council.
It likely wasn’t a popular move as many would have fixed their holiday plans around council meeting dates many months in advance and had they not changed them at a moment’s notice, they’d surely have been in the firing line for not fulfilling their role as council members.
I think it’s too easy for some to forget that just because a person is elected onto a public body, it doesn’t mean that the public are able to control and criticise what they are doing in their private time.
Nevertheless, they turned up for the meeting which was just as well because it was about the hot topic of the season: bonfires.
There had been much discussion on the matter leading up to the eleventh night bonfires and controversy ensued as it transpired that the council had seemingly been storing bonfire material that was later stolen.
All quite the ruckus altogether.
This meeting could have been an opportunity to actually make sure that the kind of damage that was caused to buildings this year was not repeated in the future with plans and procedures put in place now that could be implemented over the coming year.
On the face of it, this seems to be what happened as there was a proposal to council whereby bonfires that were deemed to be a threat to life, property or the environment would be forbidden and the material collected for them taken away and disposed of responsibly.
Those are aims that it would be difficult for anyone to reasonably find fault with.
However, it transpires that this was already an existing policy within the council and they’ve been removing material from both public and private land for years where they deem there to be a risk.
Unionists opposed the motion stating that they felt it was unnecessary and the Greens also voted against it, citing concerns that the safety of council workers was not fully addressed.
It seems that the Green Party have hit the nail on the head with this because it turns out that fears for personal safety have previously stopped workers from entering certain areas which has led to the council having to try and contract firms from outside Northern Ireland to carry out the work.
It doesn’t matter who it is taking away the pallets and tyres: if there’s a level of intimidation being issued then that’s what needs to be addressed and we’ve been shown yet more evidence of that.
This week marks the anniversary of Internment on these shores and it’s rightfully a delicate subject for many.
Marches and bonfires have been organised in commemoration but on Monday morning, some of those bonfires were removed and this sparked disorder in the Markets area of Belfast.
Cars were vandalised and set on fire and as the police moved in to try and restore some order, the stones and bricks were aimed at them.
The events then moved across the city to several other places, ultimately ending up in West Belfast where there were attempts to hi-jack buses and the building which previously housed the Divis Credit Union was set alight.
For hours, the people in these places were forced to put up with the undesirable actions of a few people and at one point it seemed that nothing was going to stop them in their tracks.
It’s not the kind of situation that anyone wants to be living through and I’m sure there were many people in those areas who were too afraid to go to sleep because they weren’t sure as to how things would be when they woke up in the morning.
Politicians were appealing for calm and the police had a very visible presence but it didn’t seem to be doing very much but suddenly everything seemed to stop and there were no more updates on the situation.
It was quite bewildering but then the reason became clear: it started raining.
The condemnation for these events has been universal.
It was a day of senseless violence.
This wasn’t really in reaction to the bonfire being taken away – that was simply used as a convenient excuse.
This was an example of a small group of young people who were determined to give their peers a bad name and cause as much damage as they could.
There has been some kind of failing somewhere along the line that has turned them into people who care so little about their community that they would cause upheaval to the lives of their neighbours.
The people of the Market didn’t want their Surestart facility to be damaged or for their bin collections to be suspended for the next two days.
They, just like the rest of us, want to get on with their lives and rub along as best they can.
These aren’t people trying to celebrate their culture because none of the cultures that we know and accept here have violence as a core component.
There is no way that this violence and disrespect can be justified.
These individuals weren’t focusing their hate and anger against a certain group.
Instead they were aiming to cause as much upset as possible.
Violence may have got you your own way back in the Neanderthal times, but we’ve moved on from that.
Now we like to try and talk about problems and differences in an attempt to overcome because violence only adds to the wedge that we ultimately need to overcome.
Internment was a big problem in Northern Ireland and both sides of the community were affected by it.
Looking back on it historically, many will admit that such action only prolonged ‘The Troubles’ as the feeling of injustice only added to the already deeply divided society.
Dozens died in the riots that sprung up in the days following the enactment of the policy and thousands left their homes in the hope of finding somewhere safer to live.
A huge proportion of the 1,900-odd internees had no links to paramilitary groups and that’s something that should anger us all.
We should be trying to learn from those mistakes rather than inching a little closer to going back to those times. It is knowledge that gives you power: violence ultimately takes it all away from you.