[LINK] "Observe the sons of Ulster marching to Poland"

[rfmcdonald]

This article by Anna Szulc, originally published in Poland's Przekrój and translated for Press Europ, took me by surprise. By quite a lot of surprise.

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.

[. . .]

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."

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.