The holidays are now done and dusted, so back to the drawing board – or writing board, to be more precise. What a time to have been away!

I missed the rioting, burning and looting of small businesses in Belfast.

In their ignorance, prejudice and belief in the supremacy of white-skinned Christians, the perpetrators considered the business owner to have no right to be in the United Kingdom.

They were temporarily joined by others from across the Border who were similarly misinformed on the question of the rights of any human being other than themselves.

The appearance of a ‘Coolock Says No’ banner among the racist throng of primarily, but not exclusively, Empire Loyalists was intriguing, to say the least.

I have made and carried many a banner in my day, so I know a thing or two about them. The first thing is: they don’t make themselves.

It is a day’s shared work, at least, or alternatively you can now pay some banner-making business to make it for you.

Either way, you don’t want to be making a new one for every outing, so somebody in the organising group makes sure the banner is not lost, seized or simply left behind.

Not any Dick or Cait gets to carry it, either. Looking after the banner is a responsibility.

Banners do not make their own way to demonstrations and hang around waiting for the appropriate people to fall in behind them, pick them up and wave them aloft.

The person responsible for banner safekeeping is usually that who takes it to the protest and, generally speaking, delegates the job of holding it aloft during the protest to others, as they have better things to do, like ensuring they are publicly identified as an important leader, or alternatively, avoiding identification at all.

Either way, the Coolock banner was in Belfast because people with leadership roles in the Coolock protest arranged for it to be there, and the people who lined up behind it in Dublin need to accept that it represented the same hierarchical view of the rights and value of human beings in Dublin as it did in Belfast.

They cannot pretend to have had more reasonable, acceptable motivation, or – in practical terms – not to know how their banner came to be leading the vanguard of the same mentality that burned Bombay Street to a shell because it held ‘Fenians’ in the same contempt, as lesser humans, as it holds Muslims, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

It was there because those with sufficient authority in organising the Coolock riots took it there, and it was not out of place in the company.

It did not represent the community of Coolock any more than the UDA etc. represent Belfast.

In the last analysis, all racists look the same, sound the same, and are the same, regardless of their country of origin, politics, religion, or which rung of the ladder of hierarchy they occupy.

Those who are led to believe and take at face value the repeated lie that their misfortune, their poverty, their poor health and social care service, their housing conditions, their standard of living are all in the mess they are currently in, is caused by the fact that fewer than two people in every hundred living on this whole island are not white, would need to stop insulting their own intelligence.

There are more than enough people out there willing to do that for you.

Their motive is a more calculated and cynical playing of the ‘racist’ card to deflect attention from their own failure to deal with the minority who are actually causing poverty, a housing shortage, and the collapse of decent social protection and health care: the billionaires, the foreign investor-cum-vulture capitalist, and politically, those whose ideology believe in white supremacy.

The word for that ideology is ‘Fascism’.

If you are just ‘a concerned citizen’, and are not a racist, and not a Fascist, you need to step away from the anti-immigration banners, regardless of who is providing them, and under which flag of convenience.

An examination of conscience is needed here!

Our neighbour is all humankind, and our moral duty is to respect, cherish and protect our neighbours as we would ourselves wish to be respected, cherished and protected ourselves.

There are no shortages of alternative and inclusive banners under which you can campaign and organise against homelessness, poor services for health and social care, violence against women and children, and now a shortage of opportunities to actively support the victims of government policy and practice which creates these social issues – including those victims wrongfully described as ‘illegals’.

There are no human beings who do not have a legitimate right to shelter, to food, to kindness and compassion.

The gathering of thousands of people in Belfast countering the hateful racist motives behind the riots, and the attacks on the livelihood of others, and the pretence of ‘concern for our own’ who are excluded and marginalised, was a clear message that never again will Fascism in any form be allowed to raise its head unchallenged.

Not in Palestine, not in Ukraine, not in the USA, and absolutely not on the streets of our villages, towns and cities of this island.

There is hope in the community. We need urgent and decisive action from the Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly.

Where is our Bill of Rights? Where is our Programme for Government? Where is our Racial Equality; Anti-Racism Strategy? Where is our Anti-Poverty Strategy?

Where is our fair share of the wealth of the United Kingdom, or Fair Taxation Strategy to finance the public need?

Point your protests, your banners, and your anger in that direction, and we might all get somewhere.

Meanwhile, if you can’t welcome your neighbours because they were born somewhere else, just leave the people in peace, and get on with your own life.

*****

As I was finishing this column last week, Nell McCafferty, the most influential Irish Feminist of the 1970s onwards – a journalist and writer extraordinaire – died at the age of 80.

I first met Nell in 1969 in Derry, and saw her last some weeks back when I visited her in her residence in the care home in Donegal.

A world of things changed in between, but for now, ‘Goodnight Sister’ will suffice.

‘Sleep in peace. You were worth knowing, Nell.’