As Northern Ireland reels from the racially-motivated attacks on Romanian families in south Belfast, Malachi O’Doherty asks how we can get rid of those who cannot tolerate strangers in their midst

We are learning that it only takes a small number of people to disgrace a city. For how else are we to explain it, that over a hundred people have to flee their homes to escape racist attacks on them?

We surely do not believe that those who cannot bear to have neighbours who speak a different language, are representative of us all.

Mind you, that is how we have understood our historic problem of sectarianism, that essentially we are all implicated in it.

The immediate response of many people on Wednesday morning, when they heard the news that 115 Romanians had been evacuated to Ozone, was to state clearly that they had identified in no way with those who had attacked them.

We all understood that this would be an international news story and that the consequences for the reputation of Northern Ireland would be dire.

The attacks on Romanians followed a series of attacks on eastern Europeans living in the Village area of south Belfast, after a football match between Poland and Northern Ireland at Windsor Park. Fifteen families were chased from their homes then, as in this case, by boys and young men throwing stones at their windows.

And there was also, then, the shock that people here could do such a thing, could have so little regard for how they are perceived. And there was a generous effort by many to dissociate themselves from the racist malice.

Apparently some of those families have returned to the Village area; others remain homeless, dossing on sofas in the homes of friends, in areas which they trust will be less hostile towards them.

Their experience is that this city is not able to protect them or, even yet, accommodate them.

Much of this was to be expected. Northern Ireland has been ethnically homogenous to the extent that many people here regard a white, English-speaking Christian from a few streets away as an alien.

Such people were not going to adapt easily to new neighbours from countries they perhaps had never even heard of.

Racist animosity emerges everywhere that cultures are brought into close proximity, and it is normal for many in one group to regard themselves as indigenous and put upon.

Why else would the British National Party flourish in Britain?

But there are always more people disgusted by racism than agree with it. This being a divided society, even racism seems to divide on sectarian lines, with loyalists emerging as the clods that opted to be the louts and bigots while nationalists and republicans have gained the opportunity to declare themselves liberal and decent.

I am not persuaded it couldn't have been the other way round, if loyalists were smarter. Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, speaking at an Arts Council conference on Arts and Conflict, angrily blamed the attacks on ‘fascist criminals'.

It is extraordinary that the debate on racism follows the pattern of the earlier debate we had on sectarianism, around the question of whether we live in a sick society or one in which a few louts have their way.

Some are arguing, and much of the international media will assume, that the racist violence of a few is an expression of the private bigotry of the many. And this is not helpful. Acceptance of the stranger is something that is learned.

People who have never seen many foreigners before will stare at them, even feel aggrieved that the social and cultural climate around them is changing. The dangerous bigot is the one who refuses to acknowledge and accept that change.

Those who may even be saddened by it, but accept it, don't deserve to be guilt tripped.

But how likely is it that the boys and young men who attacked the homes of Romanians in south Belfast are ‘fascist criminals'?

More likely, their aversion to the foreigner comes out of the same school yard impulse to mock all who are different.

It is a boy thing, a horrid determination to define the tribe in terms that give you status and power within it. It is something pathetic but it runs deep and it is almost universal.

It will only end when we have a society in which boys and young men feel that the tribe is firmly defined by others over them and that the tribe, or community, does not accept this kind of behaviour.

On that impossible day, it is not only eastern Europeans who will be freed from this childish pestering; everyone who has been unsettled by apelike grunting will feel spared and relieved.