Last Tuesday evening (Violence erupts in Belfast after protests over knife attack, 9 June), my wife received a phone call from the company that provides the care workers who help to look after her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease. As the call was ending, a Romanian family of two children and two adults were being forced out of their home in the street where my mother-in-law lives, in a predominantly loyalist housing estate on the outskirts of Belfast.
The care workers were new arrivals in Northern Ireland and were afraid of being attacked if they entered the area, but eventually they did so, despite the threat. I heard from others who were in the area at the time that, as the Romanian family were being evacuated from the area by police, a group of women linked arms and cheered, and men and boys clapped. Events like these happened all over Belfast on Tuesday and Wednesday as people, including pregnant women, were in some instances taken to police stations for safety.
