> There's an article in this week's Russian Newsweek
> about beatings and general harrassment (by both
> Protestants and Catholics) of Lithuanian gastarbeiters
> in Northern Ireland (I can imagine the Russian
> nationalist readers of the article saying "Go
> Ireland!" :) ) Do you know anything about it?
Yeah, though it's not just limited to Lithuanians. The North is regularly described as the most bigoted place in Western Europe - here's a link to the most recent study on it:
http://news.ulster.ac.uk/releases/2007/2980.html
It's widely acknowledged that while hate crimes take place in both Catholic (nationalist) and Protestant (unionist) areas, the latter are responsible for the huge majority of them - I've seen estimates of up to 90%. There are a few reasons for this:
- unionist paramilitaries have long-standing links to the British far right (Combat 18 etc) - the loss of privilege for unionists that has accompanied the long, slow, unfinished transition from a sectarian police statelet to a more modern and egalitarian society has left them looking for scapegoats, and immigrants are as always an obvious target - the nationalist leadership is in general more progressive and tolerant than the unionist leadership. An interesting example of this was in a recent Northern Assembly motion on banning discrimination based on sexual orientation. The "Catholic" parties voted for the ban; most of the "Protestant" parties voted against it. - many of the new immigrants are Catholics (including Lithuanians, I believe?), giving unionist bigots an additional motive to attack them
The South hasn't got a great record in this regard either, in fairness, although by all accounts it's definitely worse up there...