Brett Campbell
Today at 17:14
Three young boys have been charged in connection with a fire at a church in Co Antrim last week.
The Church of the Holy Name in the Station Road area of Greenisland was gutted in a blaze last Sunday evening.
Two of the suspects are aged 11 and the other is 10-years-old.
All three have been charged with arson and are due to appear at Belfast Youth Court on Monday, September 30.
"As is normal procedure all charges are reviewed by the Public Prosecution Service,” a PSNI spokesperson said.
The incident is not being treating as a racially motivated hate crime.
Nine fire-fighting appliances and 49 firefighters attended the scene of the blaze.
Photographs showed substantial damage to its hall, where a section of the roof was destroyed in the fire which began around 9pm.
An online fundraiser set up by Rev Isy Hawthorne Steele’s niece to pay for the repair work has now reached almost £20k – more than the three times the initial goal.
"We’ve been overwhelmed by the love and support of the community after the devastating fire at the Church of the Holy Name (Church of Ireland) in Greenisland,” the GoFundMe page states.
“Many of you have asked for a way to support us as we seek to rebuild, and one of the suggestions was a GoFundMe page.
"We would really appreciate the support if you would like to contribute. Thank you.”
As of Sunday evening, a total of 468 generous donors had heeded the call and gave £19,230.
Worship went ahead earlier in the day at a Greenisland Methodist church directly opposite the destroyed building where parishioners normally congregate.
The service was streamed online and showed families enjoying the service which began at 9.30am.
"We are not exactly the slickest of operations,” a church minister conceded.
by pickneyboy3000
11 comments
https://preview.redd.it/w93mcn83dmnd1.jpeg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=333f1a2792afeb3bca6b0fe60da45cc415011ce2
Posting this in relation to the incident from Sam McBride.
Sam McBride
Today at 13:00
As darkness descended last Sunday, an inferno seriously damaged the Greenisland Church of Ireland building and completely destroyed the parish hall.
Police and firefighters quickly declared it a suspected arson, adding to the sadness of those who’d celebrated, mourned and worshipped in a church which had just marked its 70th anniversary.
This was a tragedy for the church and for the community in this commuter village on the northern shores of Belfast Lough.
But for others, it was an opportunity. What happened in the hours after the fire began is a case study in how deceitful propagandists now shape global opinion.
Having once lived in Greenisland, just a minute’s walk from the church, I watched in dismayed bemusement at the explosion of dishonest ‘reporting’ on social media.
On Monday morning, Europe Invasion, a notorious and influential account on X, (formerly Twitter), posted a video of the blazing building to its half a million followers with the words “Please share, because the mainstream media will not share it”.
That was a lie; the story had been leading every major media outlet in Northern Ireland since it broke, and the story would be covered extensively for days.
However, such obvious lies no longer bother many people. For others reading this thousands of miles away, they’d no immediate way of knowing the claim was nonsense.
Europe Invasion — whose content has been promoted by billionaire X owner Elon Musk despite it spewing out a slew of falsehoods — and other such accounts had already conditioned their followers as to who was for who to blame.
Thousands of people, many of whom will never have even never been to Northern Ireland, let alone know anything of the demographics of Greenisland, pronounced this as obviously the work of Muslims.
In fact, Greenisland is one of the last places a knowledgeable person would make that claim without evidence. According to the 2021 census, 95 per cent of Greenisland residents were born in Britain or Ireland, 96 per cent are white and less than 2 per cent follow non-Christian religions.
But facts count for nothing. To ‘TruthWarrior5X’, “This looks like co-ordinated attacks. It is obvious who hate Christians. Muslim IMMIGRANTS are doing it (sic)”. ‘White American Fren’ was unembarrassed at being openly racist: “It’s (brown and black) invaders… deport non-whites.”
Taking things further, ‘IrishRiverBilly’ insisted, “We know who is destroying Christian churches” and advocated throwing them from the Cliffs of Moher. Another, ‘Exmuslim121’, supported violence: “Everytime a muslim burns a church, burn a quran (sic).”
There are thousands of such comments, not hidden but openly available, on just one platform, X.
The Europe Invasion post was viewed by more than 1.4 million people — equivalent to almost the entire adult population of Northern Ireland.
As it circulated around the far-right social media ecosystem, the self-reinforcing idea that this was an attack by Islamic migrants gathered force. The fire was picked up on by Paul Golding, a convicted criminal who now leads the extremist Britain First group.
American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones posted the image of the burning church to his followers with the message “Islam loves you”.
There were posts in Polish, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Italian, French, German, Portuguese and Greek. Many were copied and pasted translations of the Europe Invasion post and the vast bulk involved anonymous accounts.
In this anonymity, it is impossible to know the truth. It seems fanciful to believe this is just a handful of people controlling hundreds of thousands of accounts, but almost certainly the true number of these individuals is far smaller than their online presence implies.
It’s easy to see how this potent propaganda can be used strategically to destabilise populations in countries thousands of miles away.
The video Europe Invasion posted was taken by Stewart Dickson, a veteran MLA for the Alliance Party. An elder in the nearby Presbyterian Church, he’d gone to the scene of the fire to offer support.
Although a well-known elected representative, Dickson’s post was viewed just over 6,000 times, a tiny fraction of the millions of impressions from outlets such as Europe Invasion, which by paying X for premium access is given preferential treatment by the platform’s algorithm.
We’ve handed almost unfettered power over mass communication to a man who just last week praised a Holocaust denier, saying a video in which he claimed Winston Churchill was the main villain of the Second World War the Second World Warwas “very interesting” and “worth watching”.
Dickson told me he was appalled by what had happened: “It’s so obvious to me that none of these people are local. What on earth is going on when a tragic fire is used like this? I’m just horrified.”
One response he saw said “burn a mosque”; he reported it to the police but has little confidence they’ll be able to do much.
After more than a decade, he’s decided to leave X and is going to challenge every Northern Ireland taxpayer-funded body to leave the site. “It used to be a public information board, but that’s gone,” he said.
If there was an intent to attack the church (and the rector believes there wasn’t), the far more likely culprits would be racists in loyalist ranks. Indeed, the Muslim Council of Northern Ireland said it was “deeply saddened” by the attack.
The day before the fire, the church hosted an outdoor party with a charity that supports migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. It involved Christians and Muslims, black and white, eating food, playing games and enjoying music. Some don’t want that.
Days earlier, another church used by many migrants was attacked in east Belfast, seemingly by a small group of loyalists.
The renegade South East Antrim UDA has a power base in Greenisland estate, just yards from the church building in Greenisland.
It appears that the fire wasn’t intended to burn down the church but was the result of vandalism by young people who’d set fire to bins.
However, if someone did want the building destroyed, it’s far more plausible it was the work of racist thugs enraged at the church’s embrace of multiculturalism than that an Islamic fundamentalist attacked a church which the previous day had welcomed those of all faiths. But that won’t go viral on social media.
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/sam-mcbride/how-a-tragic-fire-at-ni-church-was-seized-on-by-the-worlds-leading-conspiracy-theorists/a1518689954.html
If true..
Isn’t that just so sad. Younger kids without a moderating parental influence present to steer them away from alleged delinquency, criminal vandalism or prejudice based behaviors.
Tragic.
>An online fundraiser set up by Rev Isy Hawthorne Steele’s niece to pay for the repair work has now reached almost £20k – more than the three times the initial goal
Are churches poor?
Imagine the home those two wee *angles* come out of.
I would love for there to be a law that punishes the parents of minors for their actions in regards to breaking laws. Like an extra tax levy for those that are working or a suspension of certain benefits if they are in receipt of them. I guarantee that this would soon see a clampdown of antisocial behavior once a few of the ‘my jonnys an angel’ brigade get the idea that they are being held responsible for their offsprings actions.
I wonder if the same people doing their anti-Islam/immigrant dog whistles on Facebook and Twitter about this incident have the intellectual fortitude to eat their words after seeing this information
This is sad and I hope they get a real ticking off with their parents in front of the judge but they are still kids who made a mistake. We were all little shits to some degree or another in our youth.
In a civilised society the parents or guardians would face prosecution too. But this is Northern Ireland, where hatred and violence are considered both a culture to be celebrated and a winning political strategy.
Just got off a Glider stopped 3 times by kids pressing emergency stops.
Driver was pissed but helpless.
Things are at a boiling point.
Parents should also be charged and sentenced with neglect leading to arson.