It was a far cry from how the city was portrayed, and helped portray itself, for decades.
Media reporting - sometimes out of carelessness, at others prompted by a need to simplify matters for a wider audience in the UK, Europe and the US - often focussed on the northern capital's sectarian divide in which both 'sides' were depicted as equally to blame for the hatred that flowed through and often flooded the city.
The racist beast, impregnated by hatred and hoping to deliver offspring as poisonous as itself, has been flexing its muscles. Perhaps those feeding the gargoyle felt confident enough in a city long riven by sectarian hatred to take to the streets with an equally virulent strain of bigotry. How wrong that proved to be. The anti-racist demonstrations which brought thousands onto the streets to both counter the racist gatherings and give solidarity to those in the far right crosshairs, ended up dwarfing them. Hospitality trumped hatred. And with it a decades long marathon of bad press found itself swept away in the deluge that drowned out those who wanted a biblical type flood to drown all the immigrants.
The image of the nationalist community in Belfast has not been damaged in the slightest by the events of recent days. The same cannot be said of the unionist community even though many of the city’s trade unionists would hail from unionist backgrounds and would abjure racism. Yet, it is from within that community that the vast bulk of the racist hatred has emanated, underscored in the public mind by the name given to one of the organising principals for racist gatherings - the Official Protestant Coalition. Calls for Christians to gather in Nuremberg style rallies have seemingly managed to draw the burn again Christians rather than the Christian community in general. So vile has the hatred been that it even attracted into its lair the racist dregs from Coolock.
The leadership of political unionism has helped in the tarnishing of its own community. No sign of DUP banners or leaders at the anti-racist demonstration. Sinn Fein and SDLP politicians were quite visible. The backdrop to their absence is that prominent DUP figures were wholly supportive of Brexit, which was carried over the line on the back of a large swathe of racist sentiment against immigrants.
Ireland, north and south, should indeed be looking after its own. To those gathering to head off racism at the pass, Ireland's own are the poor, the disadvantaged, the discriminated against, the refugee, the person hated for not being white.
The racist looters, the biblical burners, the hate vendors are on the backfoot. Belfast still has its bigots but is no longer a bastion of bigotry. Last week the city stood up for the Wretched of the Earth against the Wicked of the Earth.
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