Last Tuesday evening (Violence erupts in Belfast after protests over knife attack, 9 June), my wife received a phone call from the company that provides the care workers who help to look after her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease. As the call was ending, a Romanian family of two children and two adults were being forced out of their home in the street where my mother-in-law lives, in a predominantly loyalist housing estate on the outskirts of Belfast.

The care workers were new arrivals in Northern Ireland and were afraid of being attacked if they entered the area, but eventually they did so, despite the threat. I heard from others who were in the area at the time that, as the Romanian family were being evacuated from the area by police, a group of women linked arms and cheered, and men and boys clapped. Events like these happened all over Belfast on Tuesday and Wednesday as people, including pregnant women, were in some instances taken to police stations for safety.

On Thursday evening, my wife managed to see the family before they returned on a flight to Romania, as they picked through the remains of their life. Both parents worked, and were not part of an “alien culture” as described by some appalling local politicians. Their kids went to the same school that my daughter did. They weren’t alien; they were one of us.

On explaining this horrific situation to a lifelong friend in England who has rightwing sympathies, and outlining that the children were born here and British citizens, they replied by sending me travel brochures for Romania and suggesting that children are resilient and will get over it.

I was reminded of Heinrich Heine’s observation that where they burn books, eventually they will burn people. When society others a group because of their skin colour, we are in a very dangerous situation. But when people are indifferent to suffering, we are at a completely different level.
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