Last Tuesday evening, my wife received a phone call from the company that provides care workers for her mother, who has Alzheimer's disease. As the call ended, a Romanian family of two children and two adults were being forced out of their home in the street where my mother-in-law lives, in a predominantly loyalist housing estate on the outskirts of Belfast.
The care workers, new arrivals in Northern Ireland, were afraid of being attacked if they entered the area, but eventually they did so despite the threat. I heard from others in the area that, as the Romanian family was evacuated by police, a group of women linked arms and cheered, while men and boys clapped. Similar events occurred across Belfast on Tuesday and Wednesday, with people, including pregnant women, taken to police stations for safety.
On Thursday evening, my wife saw the family before they returned on a flight to Romania, as they picked through the remains of their life. Both parents worked and were not part of an 'alien culture' as described by some appalling local politicians. Their kids attended the same school as my daughter. They were not alien; they were one of us.
When I explained this horrific situation to a lifelong friend in England with rightwing sympathies, outlining that the children were born here and are British citizens, they replied by sending me travel brochures for Romania and suggesting that children are resilient and will get over it.
I was reminded of Heinrich Heine's observation that where they burn books, eventually they will burn people. When society others a group because of their skin colour, we are in a very dangerous situation. But when people are indifferent to suffering, we are at a completely different level.
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