The Anonymous Widower

Romanians in Belfast

Over the last few days there have been a lot of attacks on Romanians in Belfast.  Racist?  Of course they are.

But then Northern Ireland they know all about racism and sectarianism!  It may have been pushed under the surface between Catholics and Protestants, but it does appear to have come out again, where these Romanians are concerned.

Here’s a report from the BBC explaining the backround.

I get very heated about racism and immigrants being treated very badly.

Read Robert Winder’s excellent book Bloody Foreigners and there is a piece about poor Jews and Germans coming to work in the fur trade in the East End of London.

An 1854 police report estimated that there were two thousand destitute Germans in what Alexander Herzen called ‘the miry bottom’ of London. Von Meysenburg wrote, ‘Poor German families there are by the hundreds. The work is stamping raw pelts at a German fur factory, Imagine a big barrel in a very warm room, filled to the very top with ermine and sable skins. A man climbs into the barrel stark naked and stamps and works with his hands and feet from morning until night.

That could well have been my father’s antecendents, as they are down in the census as fur skin dressers and they lived in the poorest parts of the East End.

Winder’s book also contains a whole chapter on Huguenots.  My mother’s family are all descended from these religious refugees from France.

So when I hear stories like this from Belfast, I reach for my disgust hooter.  And use it.

June 24, 2009 - Posted by AnonW | News | Northern Ireland, Politics, Religion