In the last 11 days, more than 20,000 people attended over 150 events featuring 2,500 participants at Derry’s Féile, but three bonfires got the headlines.
The pyres, lit on the Lecky Road in the Bogside, Bligh’s Lane in Creggan, and Corrody Road in the Waterside, are being treated by police as “sectarian-motivated hate crimes” because of material placed on them.
Most were flags and emblems associated with unionism and loyalism, including Union flags, poppy wreaths and sashes, but also political material and, on the Bogside bonfire, a picture of the First Minister, Sinn Féin vice-president Michelle O’Neill.
It is far from the first time O’Neill, or indeed politicians in general, have been thus targeted and it has been widely condemned, including by O’Neill herself, who wrote on social media that this was “the very opposite of republicanism”.
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“I will continue to call out sectarianism, anti-community activity and destruction wherever it comes from,” she wrote, adding that such bonfires “are a blight on our community”.
Yet just as sectarianism persists, so too do bonfires remain a feature of the northern summer in both nationalist and loyalist areas.
“Obviously it’s disappointing to see those emblems on the bonfire – disappointing to see the bonfire at all – but it’s important to put it into context in that we had a huge community festival in the Bogside area, and it was really successful,” says Foyle MP Colum Eastwood.
“Of course we need to move away from bonfires, and anyone aping the worst elements of loyalist culture needs to get their act together,” he says. “But they are a tiny minority.”
That tiny minority are dissident republicans; the local view is that, in recent years, Sinn Féin has lost support among a younger generation that is easily manipulated – and brought on to the streets – through the presence of dissidents, albeit few in number.
There was anger, too, that pallets being stored for the bonfire were removed last week by the Department of Infrastructure, with police support. “It was right and proper that this material was removed,” O’Neill told media in Derry ahead of an appearance at Féile.
The festival in the Bogside and its surrounding areas began, like its larger Belfast cousin, Féile an Phobail, in the 1990s, as an alternative to the violent disorder that often accompanied contentious events such as bonfires and marches.
“This issue around bonfires is something that rears its head year on year, but it’s something that we will continue to provide diversionary activity around, in the hope that in years to come they will become a thing of the past,” says Féile’s festival director, Gareth Stewart.
“Unfortunately, there are elements within our society who choose to exploit children and young people… this is done by adults who are taking young people down a path that can lead to prison, or worse,” he says. “There’s no other word for it other than child abuse.”
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In their youth work, “our job is to create a society where our young people can achieve their potential and realise their dreams, not fall into the trap that is sectarianism”, says Stewart.
But, he warns, tackling sectarianism will take “significant investment from multiple sources” and “at the moment, that doesn’t exist in Derry”.
