Same Old Same Old

Associated Press report from Belfast:

Political and religious leaders pleaded Wednesday for Catholic teenagers and children engaged in Belfast rioting to stop before one of them is killed and becomes a martyr for Irish Republican Army dissidents.

Their appeals follow three nights of street mayhem in working-class Catholic parts of Belfast that one priest described as ''a Disney theme park for rioting.'' Children as young as 9 have been attacking static lines of riot police, while other youths cheer them on and take photos for display on social networking sites such as Facebook.

Actually, it may well not be the same old reasons for why rioting is happening in Belfast now — in fact, after so much peace processing and associated cossetting in the form of public spending, direct / indirect investment, encouraging noises from the rest of the entire world, visits by the Clintons, you might wonder that anyone in Northern Ireland would have time to stop from enjoying the fruits of peace to start a riot.

Certainly rioting 30 years ago might be easily explained by pointing to the second-class status of Catholics, the institutional discrimination, the employment discrimination, the fact that the Northern Irish state was created as government of the Catholics for the Protestants and by the Protestants. That hardly applies to the present day, largely. So there must be Other Reasons... but I have to say that even thinking about it all makes me want to take a nap.