Séamas O'Reilly: I remember when Catholics were chased out of their homes by loyalist gangs

Belfast still has an ethnic minority tally of less than 7% — a significant proportion of whom were either born there, or are overseas students on temporary visas

Séamas O'Reilly: 'There is no material or political condition which makes the actions of these rioters explicable without “racism” being the most important single component.' Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

Riots spread across England for the past week, their purported launchpad being the horrific murder of three young girls in Southport.

Fake reports from online disinformation accounts claimed that the attacker was a Muslim migrant who had arrived via small boat, but he was soon revealed to be a Cardiff-born teenager whose parents are Rwandan Christians. This clarification did nothing to assuage the rioters, whose growing violence remained aimed universally at migrants and Muslims.

From Hull to Middlesborough, asylum seeker housing was mobbed and set on fire. In Tamworth, one hotel was set alight while its residents were still inside, its walls daubed with graffiti declaring “FUCK P*KIS”. In Southport and Rotherham, mosques were targeted, and in Liverpool a young Muslim man was stabbed at a train station. Elsewhere, non-white individuals were chased down streets, dragged from their cars, or had their businesses burned down.

In the aftermath, there has been overwhelming revulsion, but also numerous statements from gatekeepers of ‘respectable’ anti-immigrant hatred, decrying the violence but insisting that this was a sad, yet inevitable, consequence of multiculturalism itself. Noted class warriors, The Telegraph, claimed that this was the poor people of Britain taking their ire against disconnected elites — a definition of “elites” that excludes the massively powerful right-wing press, but somehow includes minimum-wage delivery workers, taxi drivers, and terrified child refugees, screaming inside burning hotels. Sure, their theory goes, such violence is awful, but none of this would be happening without the failures of immigration policy itself; perhaps tackling that, and not the violence of racists, is the best way forward.

At the risk of stating something so obvious it demeans us both, there is no material or political condition which makes the actions of these rioters explicable without “racism” being the most important single component.

We can, obviously, have a conversation about misinformation, and the way in which sinister online agitators have capitalised on social breakdown and political disenfranchisement, while also acknowledging that chief among these disinformers has been the ceaseless attacks on immigrants from Britain’s press and political establishment, implicating foreigners for every failure of government for as long as I’ve been alive.

This side of the water, agitators in Belfast clashed with police, set immigrant-owned businesses alight, and stomped on a man’s head, in what the PSNI have termed a hate crime. During the initial protests, much was made of one image of a Northern Irish flag side by side with an Irish tricolour, brought to Belfast by the anti-immigrant rabble-rousers behind the recent Coolock protests. 

People taking part in an anti-Islamic protest march through Belfast city centre.

To some, this represented a landmark moment in global politics. “This is incredible” wrote one such credulous gombeen, “Catholics and Protestants are quite literally marching shoulder to shoulder in Belfast… as they demand an end to mass immigration.” The idea that a small group of anti-immigrant protesters from Dublin might have something in common with a larger group of anti-immigrant protesters who happen to be loyalists, is not exactly something we would consider “incredible” back home.

All available evidence suggests that this small group from Coolock aside, the makeup of the protests was of a depressingly familiar hue — the same far-right quotient of hardline loyalism that has been chasing immigrants out of their homes for decades. The only example, so far, of it spreading to traditionally republican areas are the grim reports of children throwing eggs at a Middle Eastern shop on the Falls Road on Tuesday night. Depressing, most certainly, but hardly indicative of a rainbow coalition of bigotry forming across age-old barricades. At that very moment, in unionist Woodvale, foreigners were being forcibly removed from their homes by masked men wielding baseball bats.

As someone born and raised in the North, I’m old enough to remember when Catholics were chased out of their homes by loyalist gangs in East Belfast on a regular basis. In fairness, a three-year-old could repeat the same trick because this still happens, with depressing frequency, even today. I’ve found there is very little equivocation about the legitimate concerns of said gangs. Those mental gymnastics never happen because, thankfully, when it comes to simply not wanting to see Catholics or Protestants breathing the same air as you, bigotry can finally be called bigotry in 2024. It’s only once the subject of their ire is, say, Afghan or Sudanese, that people begin falling over themselves to pretend they can’t understand what’s going on.

So, for the sake of argument, let’s say mass migration is a social cancer that’s eating away at the foundations of society. Let’s discount every contribution our immigrant neighbours make to society, the vital role they play in our lives, our communities, and our families. Let’s blind ourselves to the fact that migrants commit crimes at a lower level than the native population, give back more money to the State than they take out, and contribute massively to the research and academic institutions that power our economy. Let’s ignore the stark reality that declining birth rates in Britain and Ireland mean that we are existentially dependent on overseas workers to keep our public sector and service industries afloat, to staff our small businesses, and help our most vulnerable citizens into their beds each night.

Let’s just say that migration’s benefits to our culture, community, and economy are all somehow outweighed by the whiplash felt by concerned, decent communities who feel “invaded” by people whose customs and culture they find incompatible with their own. It is then we are faced with the fact that Belfast, a capital city with a storied history of shipping and industry, still has an ethnic minority tally of less than 7% — a significant proportion of whom were either born there, or are overseas students on temporary visas.

The root of these problems, in Belfast or anywhere else, has never been some legitimate concern by people overwhelmed by “evil foreigners”, but a loud and angry minority convinced by powerful forces that any number of non-white faces is too many. We have a word for that. It is racism. We should use it.