Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

It is fine to say we are concerned about the underlying causes and the problems faced by young people and less well-off communities in the North but fine words and noble aspirations must be matched with deeds and a serious analysis of why young working class people in the North, particularly in Protestant areas although there are very significant problems for young working class, less well-off people right across the North, feel so alienated and that alienation manifests itself in the way that it did in the explosion of sectarian violence. There will have to be a bit of soul searching by the political establishment in the North and by the political establishment generally as to why that happened.

The Taoiseach said that the protests were largely spontaneous but there was some element of stoking it up by loyalist parliamentary groups initially. I suggest there was another significant factor, which the Taoiseach has not acknowledged but he should acknowledge, and our comrades in Sinn Féin should also acknowledge this. The Deputy First Minister's party, the DUP, and the Official Unionist Party put 40,000 leaflets around east Belfast and Protestant areas, stoking up the issue. This was a major contributory factor to an explosion of violence and anger among young people.

I certainly do not believe it was a coincidence that was done at the same time when, for example, the Minister, Nelson McCausland, announced the plan to effectively privatise the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. That is pretty telling. If we remember back to the history of the most recent phase of violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the North, how did it begin? It began on the issue of housing, housing allocation and discrimination in the allocation of insufficient housing for the least well-off. Housing remains a massive problem in the North and now the Northern Ireland Executive is planning to privatise social housing, to outsource it, not in a dissimilar fashion to the way the Government is doing here with leases to property developers, except in the North it will be to housing associations and rents are likely to increase. In addition, there is a massive 25% youth unemployment and cuts have been imposed in hospital services and so on. These factors and deliberate stoking up of these issues along tribal lines helped focus youth alienation and anger felt by the less well-off sectors of society in the North along sectarian lines.

In addition, the structures of the Northern Ireland political set up are a form of institutionalised sectarianism which guarantee that politics tends to be expressed in a sectarian fashion. The arrangements and quota systems in terms of balancing Nationalist and Unionist in the North are almost exactly the same as those that were set up by the French in the Lebanon in 1920s which led to decades of sectarian conflict there-----

See this speech in context