When the political temperature rises high in mainland Britain, it causes real fires in Northern Ireland with its toxic tradition of political violence.
In the wake of the stabbing of a man by a Sudanese asylum seeker in north Belfast, masked gangs set houses and shops owned or occupied by racial minorities ablaze. Muslims, Hindus and Ukrainians all became victims.
The attacks took place in Protestant districts in Belfast and towns like Portadown, suggesting that anti-Catholic sectarianism has transmuted into anti-migrant racism. Though rioters shouted anti-immigrant slogans, Northern Ireland has fewer immigrants and asylum seekers than almost any part of the UK.
‘Reopening wounds in Northern Ireland is easy enough, because past wounds have never truly closed and continue to fester’
Read Patrick Cockburn’s recent dispatch from Belfast here.
The rioters ran quickly from street to street, but were not large in number, according to a local eyewitness, who estimated the largest group at some 200. There is no evidence of organised paramilitary involvement; protesters were called together by social media messages, enabling the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to know through monitoring where trouble was most likely to erupt.
What makes the protests and the riots which followed different from past street violence in the area is the encouragement given to the protesters by far-right leaders abroad. Though none called for violence, on X, the site’s owner Elon Musk shared lists of locations where protests could take place – also posted by far-right activist Tommy Robinson – and retweeted Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe’s post saying “millions must go” with a screengrab of footage of the knife attack.
The worst of the violence was in heavily Protestant east Belfast, where a makeshift barricade was erected out of burning litter bins and a bus was burned out. Masked men went door to door ordering out foreigners.
I spoke to an immigrant from Africa living in north Belfast some months ago who told me that he had been the victim of escalating “anti-black racism which is becoming more common among Protestants and has grown out of traditional anti-Catholic sectarianism”. He said he was planning to move to the Catholic/nationalist Falls Road area of west Belfast.
Asked if he thought the anti-immigrant attacks might persist, the journalist and historian Brian Feeney told me that he did not believe they would continue for long: “The loyalist groups involved are small in numbers, incidents have been confined to isolated areas, and all political leaders have condemned it.”
He says that there are few asylum seekers in Northern Ireland – possibly the least likely place in the UK to attract a foreign migrant for security and economic reasons – and there are almost none in the places that have seen the worst anti-immigrant violence. Nevertheless, he suspects that the riots make it more likely that Northern Ireland will have a violent summer in the lead-up to the bonfires and marches celebrating the anniversary on 12 July of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
Political violence is never far below the surface in Northern Ireland and has been stoked by the destruction of Gaza by Israel, which has further divided Protestant and Catholic communities. Protestant demonstrators frequently carry Israeli flags while Catholics tend to support the Palestinian cause. When Northern Ireland agreed to take two or three Palestinian children from Gaza for medical treatment under a UK-wide scheme, Jim McAllister – the leader of Traditional Unionist Voice, a hard-line unionist party – said that once they had been treated, they must return to where they came from “because the UK cannot take any more asylum seekers or migrants”.
Last summer already saw anti-immigrant riots – again confined to Protestant majority areas – which were more violent than anywhere else in the UK. Migrants from the Roma community in Ballymena – known as “the buckle in the Protestant bible belt” – saw their houses burned and were forced to flee after reports of an alleged sexual assault by two men, a charge that was later withdrawn. Some of those forced out of their houses took refuge in a leisure centre in Larne, on the coast 20 miles from Ballymena, but they still were not safe and were attacked a second time after the leisure centre was set alight by masked men.
Far-right racism in mainland Britain and traditional Northern Ireland sectarianism combine in bizarre ways. In Moygashel, a Protestant village on the outskirts of Dungannon in County Tyrone with a population of about 1,000, a boat containing a dozen life-size effigies of migrants in yellow life jackets was placed on top of a huge 12 July bonfire last year. Below the boat were signs reading “Stop the Boats” and “Veterans before Refugees”. Last weekend in Moygashel, a banner depicting Muslims behind a barrier reading “not welcome, not wanted, not here”, which had been put up beside a children’s play park, was removed by the police.
The residents of Belfast, Portadown and elsewhere will sweep up and count the cost of the damage to their communities. Yet it seems inevitable that more violence and destruction are still to come.
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