On Ardoyne Road on Wednesday afternoon, the original conflict resumed. Two loyalists passed a couple of nationalists, and they exchanged hostilities. ‘Go on then, come here and do something!’ said one of the nationalist kids. The young loyalists – recognisable in black tracksuits and balaclavas – continued up the hill as a third nationalist wheelied past them on a motorbike.

On Tuesday, the first night of the disorder in Belfast, Ardoyne seemed to be taken by a providential Christian comradeship. In one of the city’s harshest ‘interface areas’, Catholics and Protestants came together in protest against the knife attack on Stephen Ogilvie. Less than 24 hours later, however, things had returned to normal.

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Night one of rioting was won by the most extreme participants. They wanted to expel not just asylum seekers but migrants living legally in the area. They got their way. On Oakley Street, a short row of Victorian houses coming off Crumlin Road (which descends from the Belfast Hills through Protestant Ballysillan past Ardoyne and into central Belfast), a Spanish family was among those who fled. A group of protesters torched the first house on the left side of Oakley Street – it looked like a smoker’s lung by Wednesday morning – and smashed the windows of the next five. Police tried to stop them but were overwhelmed.

‘They didn’t have any intel or nothing, they just burned it,’ said Josh, a white man born and raised in Belfast who lived at the top of Oakley Street with his partner and child. (Names have been changed.) He looked down his road as he spoke. Union Jacks and Ulster flags decorated many homes, telling rioters that they were occupied by Brits. Josh said the only reason the fire didn’t spread was because of an easterly wind blowing out of Oakley. ‘The guy that owns the first house, he rents it out to aeroplane stewardesses. No one in this street is bad. We used to have bad people, but they all moved out after the last protest’, Josh said.

During those last protests, in June last year, I was in Ballymena, where the........

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