A week before Chinese New Year and the Belfast offices of the Northern Ireland Chinese Welfare Association are predictably manic.

At the front entrance of their University St H.Q, a hassled member of staff stalks the lip of the doorway, waiting anxiously for a taxi that’s due to pick up some of the many boxes, stacked with fliers, that are crowding the hall. Further in and reception is struggling with a perma-ringing phone system. People are dropping mobiles as they run up the stairs, doors are slamming shut, there’s some raucous laughter and the sound of a kettle boiling. Things are all-go.
“It’s hectic at the minute,” smiles Leish Cox, Community Relations Officer with the CWA. “Tonight our youth group are launching a comic that they’ve put together, on Wednesday we’re having a storytelling afternoon at the Linen Hall Library and on Sunday there’s going to be a big gala open day at St George’s Market to celebrate the Chinese New Year. There’ll be fireworks, dancing, music, beer tasting – a really fun, upbeat occasion. It’s the biggest event we’ve ever put on in Belfast. We’re a small organisation and we’re running it pretty much ourselves, so it’s all hands to the pump. We’re all going a wee bit mental at the minute.”
A glance at the posters lining the walls of Cox’s office should give an indication of the more mundane kind of work that, during less festive periods, occupies much of the organisation’s time – there are advertisements for Chinese dance and cookery classes; English, Mandarin and Cantonese lessons; details regarding support and social groups for both the elderly and the young. Namely: just the kind of activities that you would expect of a body catering for the specific demands and needs of the single biggest minority ethnic group in Northern Ireland, and indeed in Ireland as a whole.
Over the course of the last year, however, the CWA has found itself expending energy on more alarming matters – becoming embroiled in a dispute that has cast disturbing light on the nature and extent of racism within Northern Ireland and that has also highlighted the inability (perhaps unwillingness) of its statutory bodies to deal with the threat effectively.
At the beginning of last year, following 5 years of intensive lobbying, the Association was awarded £233,000 in Lottery Funding for the purchase and renovation of a much needed new Resource and Community Centre. Figures suggest that there are currently over 8,000 people of Chinese origin resident in the country. The three storey terrace in The Holy Lands has, according to Cox, been struggling for some time to cope with the demands being placed on it.
“We’ve simply outgrown it,” she says. “It’s ready to burst. To do our job effectively and to help the community as best we can, we need to go somewhere bigger. It’s something that we’ve seen as a priority for ages. So, once we were told that it looked like happening, we were over the moon.”
They decided on a building in Donegall Pass in South Belfast that, according to Cox, “was just ideal.” An area of chronic unemployment, the high visibility of loyalist murals may lead those unfamiliar with the city to view it as a curious choice for a home-base. For the CWA, however, the case in favour was compelling. Some of the finest – and long-established - Chinese restaurants in Belfast are located along the road, there is a Chinese supermarket nearby, and a sheltered housing scheme whose residents are active participants in various CWA enterprises. A ten minute walk from Belfast City Centre, it was, the board felt, a site that they simply couldn’t pass up.
By March of last year, however, serious problems began to emerge.
“During the consultation process we put it to the local community that we were going to move there,” Cox explains. “And right from the start there was an awful lot of hostility. A public meeting was called – with no Chinese representation invited – and from what we’ve heard the opposition was pretty unanimous. There are 14 Chinese families living there in social housing, maybe 21 Chinese families living there altogether. There are over 600 houses. Because there are Chinese people coming in to use the supermarket, this notion has flourished that there is some plot to take over the area. I can assure you that that is not the case. It’s an area of incredible social deprivation. The people of Donegall Pass have lots of problems confronting them – social, economic. Ironically the Chinese community could help with the regeneration, but they haven’t been given the chance.”
At a second ‘public’ meeting, events took an even more disturbing turn.
“We’re not sure of the exact train of events, but at some point during the night a document was circulated that claimed that the Chinese Community were a greater threat than 30 years of IRA violence; that they were unchristian; and that called on people to defend their area against a supposed ‘yellow menace’. We only found out about this when a Chinese child came home one day and her parents found this stuffed in her schoolbag.”
David Ervine of The PUP was quick to condemn this development; however, the influence of loyalist paramilitaries was, according to the PSNI, being heavily exerted.
Within a fortnight of the second meeting, the front windows of the CWA office were smashed in a late night attack. South Belfast already accounted for the vast majority of racist attacks in Northern Ireland but recent months had seen an upsurge in assaults and intimidations from property. Reluctantly, the decision was made to withdraw the proposal.
“Our major concern with the issue was yes, we need to stand up to racism,” says Cox. “But we also had a responsibility towards vulnerable families and individuals who had to carry on living in the area. The whole purpose of the centre was to provide a safe place for young people and elderly to come and mix – if that safety was compromised, there was no point in going ahead.”
One of the most striking and alarming features of the episode was the lack of support the CWA received from the local representatives of the area. With an Assembly election looming, and the very real prospect of the DUP overtaking the UUP for the first time in history, neither party were prepared to support the case for the centre being situated at the chosen site. For the CWA, however, the silence of statutory bodies and established organisations proved even more galling.
“Local people and community groups from Belfast did write in to support us, but we felt the Equality Commission were no help whatsoever. They were approached and told us they had to get legal advice and then never got back to us. We felt let down by agencies that were supposed to be out championing the cause of equality but who, when push came to shove, turned their back on us. We’ve also been disheartened by the fact that the Race Equality Unit in the Office of First and Deputy First Minister has produced a draft Race Equality Strategy and it’s sitting on the shelf gathering dust. Nothing has happened with it. We’ve found that there has been very little leadership from Government, statutory bodies, even churches – when all that was going on, they remained absolutely silent.
“Belfast City Council did intervene and offered us an alternative site – but a lot of these statutory bodies never for one moment challenged the central issue – that we were not allowed our first choice. It was taken for granted that elements within local communities can dictate who can and can’t come into their area. There’s an awful lot of anger there. Belfast is changing, areas are changing. The racial makeup of the city is being transformed. You can’t dictate these kinds of things.”
Both official and anecdotal evidence would indicate that racism has now stained itself indelibly onto the (already grubby) fabric of Northern Ireland life. In October of last year the Irish News exposed an estate agent in Belfast that had been circulating in-house memos to its staff that designated properties as ‘No Chinese’ and ‘No Black or Chinese’. In general the private housing situation has proved treacherous. Individuals and families intimidated out of their homes by paramilitaries have spoken of the difficulties they have faced trying to get their (often extortionate) deposits returned.
It was revealed in parliament that two primary schools in South Belfast that had previously prided themselves on the heterogeneity of their intake, were, this September, dismayed to find only one minority ethnic pupil each enrol in their primary one classes. On Halloween night, meanwhile, a pub popular with many students (and yards away from a street where an African woman had recently been forced from her home) allowed it’s doormen to dress as members of the Ku Klux Klan. “It was a bit of fun,” a spokesperson later claimed.
“The physical attacks get the most attention but we have to make sure that the institutional racism and the general attitudes are dealt with and confronted,” says Cox. “Connolly and Keenan carried out research that discovered that people in Northern Ireland are twice as likely to be racist as they are to be sectarian. I found that astounding.”
That this is possible under the rosily ‘inclusive’ glow of the Good Friday Agreement may come as a surprise to some. However, given that this document gave official sanction to the ‘two communities’ notion of Northern Irish politics, it’s perhaps not surprising to find that those who fall outside this cosy carve-up are dealing with a far more wintry climate. Add in the residue of almost 40 years of sectarian conflict and the type of racism practiced in the North takes on a very distinctive feel.
“It is an impossible situation for minority ethnic groups. Look at the way Belfast is segregated; where exactly are minority ethnic groups supposed to fit in? We ask for something and straight away we’re told – if you get one, then we’ll have to give the Shankill and the Falls one too. There’s no attempt to address our specific needs.
“Racism has a definite unique flavour to it in Northern Ireland. It’s very sinister. We are insular in our mindset – we don’t tolerate difference and I think that influences how racism has developed here. The culture of violence; its acceptance; the idea that hating someone because of a perceived difference has a real validity. Paramilitaries are behind a lot of the attacks and have orchestrated the expulsion of minority ethnic groups from many areas. According to police figures, if you are a minority ethnic person living in Northern Ireland, you are twice as likely to suffer a racist attack than someone who lives in England and Wales. It’s decreasing across the water and going through the roof here.”
The Chinese Welfare Association have now found a new location for their Resource Centre. Situated on the Lower Ormeau Road, it is, ironically, no more than a few hundred meters away from their original choice. In contrast to their previous experience, Leish Cox says that their new potential neighbours “have been extremely welcoming.”
Just before Christmas, Criminal Justice minister John Speller claimed that “the rate of increase in the number of (racist) attacks appears to be slowing down.” Considering that this rate had, over the previous seven years, leapt by a staggering 900%, Mr Speller’s optimism had a particularly hollow ring. In fact, the number of attacks reported in 03/04 (453) had doubled from the previous year (226). It is an issue that demands action from official bodies that up until now have been noticeably flat-footed. There is also a pressing need for the wider population of Northern Ireland to display a level of self-scrutiny notable thus far only by it absence.
“If we’re going to combat racism, the police and courts will need to make a stand.” says Cox. “We need to start seeing convictions. We also need far more community-led initiatives. If there are problems within a community, they have to take control and ask some serious questions of themselves. Churches and governments have to encourage them to examine their own ideas – there’s very little that we can do on that front.”