Reactions are response to sense of belonging

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Friday was a strange day in Galway; on one hand the people were literally dancing in the streets after a phenomenal, combined effort saw us secure the EU 2020 Capital of Culture crown – but all the while, the dark shadow of Nice hung in the air.

You had to think hard to find a link between such joy and desolation – but there is one…and it is this.

Galway 2020 won for many reasons – a brilliant bid team, a huge buy-in, a rich cultural history – but more than all of that it was that sense of community, of belonging, of being a small part of a very big effort.

And a petty criminal in France chose to drive a big lorry through people’s lives and hopes and dreams because he didn’t feel he belonged anywhere.

That’s not in any way a justification because it’s far too easy to blame some sense of disenfranchisement for the wanton murder of families out to celebrate their national holiday.

But the one thing that these Jihadists all share is that they feel no loyalty to the places they were reared – perhaps even born – because they don’t belong.

Why would French citizens riddle the audience at a concert in Paris if they saw them as their own brothers and sisters?

Why would a man in a rented lorry speed along a packed prom – ploughing through families like skittles – if he had any affinity with these victims who lived in his home city?

Of course it runs deeper than that; there is some warped notion of their own perfect state, of martyrdom and sacrifice – but it’s much easier to see your victims as mere targets if you don’t see them as people, as your neighbours, guys you went to school with, played football with, laughed with, cried with.

We’ve seen this disenfranchised feeling closer to home; all the young English-born Muslims who have been radicalised and are now fighting with Isis.

Paris has been a hotbed of hatred for so long that it’s a wonder this upsurge in terrorism took so long – and we have similar powder kegs just waiting to explode right across Europe’s biggest cities.

We have a generation of people who feel they don’t belong, have no buy-in to the place they were born and raised, who feel no loyalty to the place that gave them shelter, education, a job, a career and the chance of being whatever they wanted to be.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.