APPROPRIATELY enough, the first episode of Andrea Catherwood’s new series on the state of Northern Ireland aired on Monday night, or the twelfth of July. Right on time for the return of the Orange Parades.

Scotland, England and Wales will get their chance later, but the opening series of This Union: A Sea Between Us is an attempt to take the temperature of Northern Irish politics by someone who grew up during the worst of the Troubles.

Specifically, Catherwood is looking at unionism at a time of huge turmoil thanks to Brexit, the Northern Ireland Protocol and political in-fighting within the DUP. All this in the country’s centenary year. Some birthday.

In this first episode Catherwood, who herself grew up in Belfast during the Troubles, looked specifically at loyalism.

There is always a danger that loyalism is conflated with unionism. They can overlap but they are not necessarily the same thing. Catherwood didn’t fall into that trap. Instead, she painted a portrait of a divided, angry group, predated on by gangsters calling themselves paramilitaries.

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The result was uneasy listening for those of us who grew up in Northern Ireland. Or anyone else for that matter.

Age was very much the dividing line here. One of Catherwood’s main interviewees was 19-year-old Joel Keys who was caught up in recent riots on Sandy Row in Belfast. Keys, born after the Good Friday Agreement, is an articulate spokesperson for a brand of loyalism that is increasingly outspoken and at odds with older loyalists.

He didn’t live through the Troubles so it’s perhaps understandable, albeit terrifying, when he said that while he is no fan of violence, he wouldn’t rule violence off the table. Members of the Loyalist Communities Council, a body that represents the UDA and the UVF amongst others, speaking to Catherwood were more circumspect, saying violence wasn’t the answer.

There are now more loyalist groups than there were during the Troubles, the programme pointed out. “Some of them are transitioning,” Doug Beattie, now leader of the UUP said, “but some of them are literally standing with their foot on the necks of their own communities. They are threatening them, they are using extortion, they are drug dealing. And how we can allow that still to happen now is disgraceful. All paramilitaries have to go.”

Poverty and lack of aspiration is the real enemy here. The reality is that loyalist areas of Belfast suffer from a lack of education, lack of health care and lack of social care, community worker Eileen Weir pointed out.

But some targets are easier than others. Walking through the streets with Keys, Catherwood pointed out the KAT graffiti, an acronym that stands for “Kill All Taigs” (taigs being offensive slang for Catholics). “I am interested in how people say these things, but do they really mean them?” Keys asks.

“The thing is we came from a place where that happened right around these streets in my lifetime,” Catherwood pointed out. “That was happening all the time ... This is what happened here for years and years.”

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Violence has consequences. Always. In Northern Ireland we knew all about those consequences for far too long. It would be a disaster if we now forgot that lesson.

More grim listening on The World at One earlier in the day when Sanjay Bhandari, the chair of anti-racism group Kick It Out [comma?] reacted to the racist comments on social media following England’s defeat [to Italy?] in the Euro 2020 final.

“I suppose the most depressing thing is how grimly predictable it was,” Bhandari noted. “We were watching the penalties praying that a black player doesn’t miss because we know what comes next.”

Listen Out For: Legacy of a Lioness: Amy Winehouse, Radio 2, tonight, 9pm. It will be 10 years since Amy Winehouse’s death next Friday. This Radio 2 show pays tribute to a singular talent.