The 2025 annual report of the Shared Island initiative was launched last month to the usual deafening silence from the media. This pioneering cross-border cooperation programme, initiated by Taoiseach Micheal Martin six years ago, has so far allocated €600 million (over €100 million on new projects last year) and is committed to spending two billion euro by 2035.

At the 2026 Fianna Fail Ard Fheis, also last month, Martin called Shared Island “the most consequential north-south initiative ever taken by an Irish government”. It has provided a major addition to the EU Peace and INTERREG programmes that funded so many cross-border projects in the first two decades of the century.

Martin said it is not about “reheating well-worn and comfortable rhetoric” (on RTE he was tougher, criticising the “empty rhetoric which we’ve had for nearly 100 years” – he should have inserted the adjective ‘nationalist’ into both statements). He went on: “It’s about the much harder, perhaps more uncomfortable, and certainly more important work of building the physical, societal, educational and person-to-person connections that we need if we are ever to achieve the goal of bringing people together and achieving agreement on now we are going to share our island.” He pointed out that all-island trade is now at a record high of €17 billion per year.

The Taoiseach is absolutely right. He also quoted Sean Lemass saying: “When people begin to work together it’s a habit that will grow.” I saw that with my own eyes when running the Centre for Cross Border Studies (now the Centre for Cross Border Cooperation) for 14 years up to 2013. I saw teachers and health workers and civil servants and university academics and spatial planners – including many from a unionist background – learning to work together in all-Ireland networks that we helped to bring together.

Intelligent people on both sides of the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland should welcome Shared Island: nationalists because it is a sensible way to build support for eventual unification among non-nationalists who can be won over by the economic, financial and social generosity of the Dublin government; and unionists because it’s a major ‘no strings attached’ funding source at a time when both UK Treasury and EU funding are drying up or threatening to dry up. It is accompanied by genuine efforts by Dublin to understand and help unionist communities. Strong loyalists I talk to are full of praise for Department of Foreign Affairs officials who help their projects with funding and advice.

Of course there is considerable self-interest involved from the Irish government. As the Northern Ireland editor of the Belfast Telegraph, Sam McBride, puts it: “If Martin isn’t rushing to a Border poll, then he needs to show he’s doing something on the North.”

However he goes on: “Far more significant is the strategic element. A senior official close to the Taoiseach involved in deciding how the funds are spent once told me that the key test was constitutional neutrality: Would this make sense if there was a united Ireland, and would this make sense if there was never a united Ireland? An hourly train service between Dublin and Belfast clearly ticks both boxes. Put more simply, it’s just common sense.”¹ The 40% increase in passengers using the more frequent service is another win for common sense.

Look at some of the projects funded: an islandwide nature restoration and biodiversity programme; linked therapeutic centres for children with cancer and their families; a joint women’s entrepreneurship scheme; the North learning from the South’s superior DEIS programme for tackling educational under-achievement; an all-Ireland pollinator plan; a new teaching building for the University of Ulster campus in Derry; the overseas joint marketing of the Wild Atlantic Way and the Causeway Coast in the North; working together to restore peatlands in both jurisdictions (and in Scotland); co-centres for research and innovation on climate, biodiversity and water, and on sustainable food systems; electrical vehicle charging points at sports clubs across the island; a cross-border arts and cultural heritage programme. One could go on and on listing these unquestionably common sense projects.

We all have our favourite individual projects. As a Green Party member, I was delighted to see the Nature Farming Friendly Network in the North linking up with the marvellous Burrenbeo Trust in County Clare, led by the visionary environmentalist Brendan Dunford. There are some I would criticise. I have my doubts about spending €107 million on the Narrow Water bridge across Carlingford Lough when Newry has a perfectly good by-pass and beauty spots like Carlingford medieval town and the Cooley Mountains are already adequately served by road. On a much smaller scale, what is the North-South Shared Ireland Teacher Research Exchange (T-Rex) – an all-Ireland version of an existing Southern programme – going to do that the highly successful Standing Conference on Teacher Education North and South (SCoTENS) hasn’t been doing for the past 24 years, completing literally hundreds of cross-border research projects in this area?

Which brings me to the International Centre for Local and Regional Development ICLRD). I was at the 20^th annual conference of this important all-Ireland network of planners in Dundalk last month. I heard the inaugural joint head of the North South Ministerial Council, Tim O’Connor, a former senior Department of Foreign Affairs official, call the ICLRD “a beacon of what we intended when we started this journey 28 years ago.” The former chair of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, Professor Peter Roberts, spoke of “the absolute necessity for ICLRD to continue to broker the many ‘difficult to grasp’ issues in planning on the island of Ireland.” And leading Belfast planner Diane Fitzsimons said that the ICLRD had “created the trust to bring people together from all levels of government, all professionals, planners and engineers,from all across the island.”

Building trust in order to come together to solve difficult issues on this island: isn’t that the largest part of what the Good Friday Agreement – or at least its ‘Strand Two’ North-South dimension – was all about? Yet I was amazed and disturbed to hear that ICLRD’s main university sponsors – Maynooth University and University of Ulster – may be contemplating withdrawing their funding from this highly innovative all-island network. What an extraordinarily foolish and short-sighted decision that would be.

The late Sir George Quigley, the visionary business leader who was behind both the Dublin-Belfast ‘economic corridor’ and ‘island of Ireland economy’ concepts in the 1990s, shortly before his death in 2013 praised the ICLRD’s work on the mapping of ‘functional territories’ throughout the island. He called this “a potentially exciting concept since, put at its simplest, it could hopefully be developed to provide guidance in an island context on what services should be put where, having regard to optimum catchment areas, thereby enhancing accessibility by ensuring that services are affordable, economically operated and effectively configured and managed to sustain high quality.” He urged governments to act on the ICLRD’s recommendations and “not to let a single idea that merits follow-up fall on stony ground.”²

Contrast that careful and practical, yet idealistic, scenario with the empty rhetoric demanding an utterly unplanned Border poll within the next five years from the likes of Sinn Fein and the nationalist lobby group Ireland’s Future. Shared Island is clearly part of the George Quigley/ICLRD frame of mind. Isn’t this one of the routes which will allow the people of this island one day to come together politically, having shown they can come together economically and socially?

As that wise woman, former Labour Party deputy leader Liz McManus, put it recently when praising Shared Island as the most sensible way forward: “I have this sense that here in the South, in the Republic, that very often people would like to see victory over the Northern unionists. And it’s as basic as that: ‘Ah, the last of the Brits, we’ll get them off the island…and I find that abhorrent.”³

So do I. Shared Island is a way to bring the people of Ireland together. It may be too slow – and it may not even work. But it’s hugely preferable to the old irredentist demand for ‘Brits Out’ (which effectively means ‘Northern unionists out’), which will lead us inevitably back to violence.

PS I was delighted to see that three friends (and one person I admired) were awarded Quiet Peacemaker Awards by the John and Pat Hume Foundation recently. They were Julitta Clancy of the Meath Peace Group; Paddy Harte, former chair of the International Fund for Ireland, and Colin Flynn of the asylum seeker and refugee support group, Places of Sanctuary Ireland (and Eamonn McCann, the civil rights activist, socialist and writer). In the foundation’s words, the award recognised “everyday peacemakers who, during the Troubles or today, quietly and effectively promoted peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.”

¹ ‘Hard cash, soft power: How Dublin’s millions for Northern Ireland managed to upset both unionists and nationalists’, Belfast Telegraph, 3 May

² Journal of Cross Border Studies in Ireland, Spring 2013, p.18

³ ‘There’s a bit of a buzz about being older: Liz McManus on ageing, life after politics and why she thinks Trump is a monster’, Irish Independent, 5 May

In Northern Ireland, protestant burials are often small, private affairs. Only close family go and you must be invited to attend. When we arrived, we expected a small number of people. To our surprise, there was a crowd. My dad was a solicitor and, in his later years, he’d specialised in immigration law. Some of his clients, many of them refugees, had turned out to pay their respects to him and my dad’s partner, who was Iranian.

That gesture meant everything on a miserable, awful day. When my dad was dying in the Ulster Hospital, he was cared for by NHS staff from across Northern Ireland and the world. We should thankful that people have come to Northern Ireland to help our health service. It would all but collapse without them.

Others don’t see it that way. Northern Ireland, a country defined by its violent past, has decided that every non-white person must suffer collective punishment for the actions of one man.

It takes a lot to shock people in Belfast but the brutal attack on Stephen Ogilvie on the 8th June by a refugee has horrified everyone. I know someone who arrived in the aftermath. I felt physically ill when I heard the details. They are too horrifying to write.

In the wake of the attack, Northern Ireland has once again descended into violence. This is the third summer of pogroms, protests and road blocks. In 2024 unrest broke out in Northern Ireland following the Southport attack and in 2025 it was in Ballymena when two Roma men were accused of sexually assaulting a young woman.

This time, there are checkpoints in loyalist parts of Belfast, masked men asking for IDs as they decide who is allowed in or out. Houses occupied by foreigners are being methodically targeted. A hit list of properties circulated on Whatsapp by various far right groups, their addresses obviously scoped out in advance. Online, people are compiling lists of immigration lawyers who work in the city. The atmosphere in the city is tense and unnerving.

Racism doesn’t just happen during the summer. Only four weeks ago, Amnesty International warned that racist violence was, “spiralling out of control,” in Northern Ireland. The PSNI recorded 1, 517 racist hate crimes in the past year, the highest on record.

There is no doubt that immigration is putting pressure on the system in Northern Ireland. Our public services are on their knees. The NHS is close to collapse, patients waiting years before they are seen for basic surgery. In the housing sector, where I work, homeless numbers are rising to record levels due to the lack of available housing. Mears places asylum seekers in working class communities, areas of high housing deprivation, so this is adding to housing stress. However, the root of these problems lie with local politicians, not with migrants and refugees.

Working class communities, which include migrants and refugees, suffer the most from Northern Ireland’s economic malaise. They suspect, rightly, that some middle class people would rather hold a sign welcoming refugees than have anything to do with them and the hardships they face.

Economic issues provide important context but focusing on legitimate concerns obfuscates the nature of the violence. People are writing, “whites only,” and swastikas on walls close to where people were intimidated out of their homes. Black people are not being chased out of their homes because rioters disagree with the Common Travel Area. What are we doing here?

Racism isn’t confined to one community in Northern Ireland but all the violence has occurred in protestant, loyalist/unionist areas. There are nationalists who support the riots, but they are staying quiet. Sinn Fein represents working class republican areas and Irish republicans connect with the Irish immigrant story. The republican struggle is linked to liberation movements in Palestine and anti-apartheid South Africa. In 2025, attempts to intimidate migrants in republican west Belfast were stopped quickly. This attitude could change in the future but, for now, the lack of similar action in protestant areas is embarrassing.

Being from the protestant community myself, being a unionist, this has been a shameful few days. I’m embarrassed to say I’m from Belfast.

It’s simplistic and lazy to argue that racism occurs more in protestant communities because we’re stupid, hateful people. Because we are descended from colonisers, the argument goes, we are ethnically inclined to hate other people. This ethno nationalist logic assumes that racism is natural and inevitable. That nothing can possibly be done about this.

There is a strong, anti-racist tradition in the community dating back to the 18th Century. Mary Ann McCracken, a Presbyterian, supported catholic emancipation and the abolition of slavery. Until she died at the age of 89, she could be found at the Belfast docks handing out abolition leaflets. Such was her opposition to slavery, she never touched a drop of sugar. There is a plaque in the Shankill library in tribute to the seven local men who travelled to Spain to join the international brigades and fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. When Britain First set up in Northern Ireland, they didn’t get the support they expected. According to Hope Not Hate, a member of the political group, “….noticed over time that Britain First’s “patriotism” was not welcomed by most of the Unionist community.”

Many protestants/unionists and loyalists are disgusted with the events of the past few weeks. That fact is little comfort to people who’ve been intimidated out of their homes. They don’t need to hear that most people are nice. Who cares when ethnic minorities are being ethnically cleansed from Belfast and nobody is doing anything to stop it. Racism has always been a problem in Northern Ireland, but particularly so in protestant areas. This isn’t a working class problem either. Racism comes from the top, not the bottom.

For most of its history, conservative unionism has dominated unionist electoral politics. The Ulster Unionist Party ran Northern Ireland for most of its history. The DUP, which emerged from the Free Presbyterian Church, now dominates unionism. Local protestant churches tend to be right wing and support conservative political causes. On that spectrum of opinion comes anti migrant, racist sentiment.

There have always been links between Northern Ireland and the far right, a connection that should have been squashed like a bug long ago. Combat 18, a neo nazi terrorist organisation, has links with the loyalist paramilitaries. Britain First, a far right political party, was founded in Northern Ireland in 2022.

Racism is tolerated in unionist politics. Politicians who’ve made racist remarks are always re-elected and treated with respect. Racist politicians are lauded and treated as statesmen. Take Enoch Powell, who made the infamous Rivers of Blood speech, was an Ulster Unionist MP. When he died in 1998, he was lauded by ulster unionists for his commitment to the union. David Trimble said, “Enoch Powell made a tremendous contribution to the public life of the whole of the UK.”

In recent years, elements of loyalism and unionism have become swayed by the Trump/Thiel aligned radical right. After the attack on Stephen Ogilvie. Jim Allister, blamed it on an “alien culture,” rhetoric straight from the Thiel playbook. It’s a strange choice of words in a country where we tried to kill each other for thirty years.

Online, some unionist and loyalist accounts talk about the great replacement theory and the invasion of Islam. American style aesthetics have been adopted by unionists. Jesus flags fly alongside union flags in parts of East Belfast. There are calls for Christians across Northern Ireland to march together to fight Islam and carry large, wooden crosses. This is why talk of economic concerns misses the big picture.

Growing white supremacist sentiment is growing down south as well. In the Republic of Ireland, fascists held solidarity marches in support of those that rioted. People talk of, “Ireland for the Irish,” and embracing traditional Catholicism to protect Ireland’s borders.

There is horrifying potential here. After centuries of fighting between green and orange, they could finally unite under the banner of racism. Fascists know this as well.

If Belfast’s poorest areas are left to rot and people’s lives fail to improve, the far right will gain further ground in Belfast. If politicians across the board in the NI Assembly fail to tackle festering racism in their local areas, the far right will gain ground in Northern Ireland. More than anything though, Belfast is a warning to the world. We are the future, not the past, if violence continues to happen.

Reflecting, as one of the many who put reputations on the line backing David Trimble’s tenacity in getting the Belfast Agreement ratified, there is quiet satisfaction that today by far the greater number of unionists value the longevity of the Agreement.

Most unionists have embraced inclusivity, respect nationalist neighbours and have adapted to principled power sharing. In that frame of reality.

Is it not time that the Irish versus British agitators recognised that unionist grievances add up to more that seething in silence at nationalist belligerence. Sinn Fein has systematically dumped on the B/GFA and redesigned the nationalist landscape to flatter themselves in its deception.

Almost 30 years on from the signing of historic Agreement, which Sinn Fein fervently opposed . Unionist’s scratch their heads in in bewilderment at the constitutional nationalist whom they campaigned with in favour of the BGFA now rallying behind Sinn Fein’s disruptive destroy NI-UK agenda.

A whole community opting to take unionists for a ride by summarily renouncing the Agreements ‘consent principle’.

Take a step back in time to the euphoria of expectant ‘centrists’ welcoming the prospect of a new NI-UK era as the BGFA was endorsed— compare to the doldrum politics is stuck in today. NI-UK deserves better. Centrist unionist ambitions cemented in 1998 for a NI-UK success story are regrettably washed up due to nationalist intransigence.

The internationally recognised B/GFA has not failed but lamentably some would say shamefully it has become surplus to the Sinn Fein political process.

Under the aegis of the Agreement room for democratically agreed change was built in to accommodate improvements. Mind you, never did I or Trimble or thousands of unionists ever envisage that progress would unveil the coming of the ‘Chuckle Brothers’.

Tougher though was to think that a self-confessed Provo commander would be succeeded by one of his political off-spring who would be elevated into high office as NI-UK First Minister. Maybe it didn’t start to go wrong then?

But whenever it did go wrong. What rankles unionists more than their own self-indulgent hari-kiri party division is the appalling behaviour of nationalists throwing their lot in with weaker than water BGFA republicans!

No doubting Sinn Fein triumphalism has triggered unionist resentment. The consequences of how and when unionist silence breaks are anyone’s guess.

Forestalling was not helped by on the day the results of the Scottish and Welsh elections were announced favouring nationalism in both UK regions. Mrs. O’Neill, NI-UK First Minister demonstrated Sinn Feins falsehood purporting to be suitable B/GFA partners.

Fair to say she can say what she likes as an MLA but as First Minister her message was received loud and clear. Unionists have not miss heard nor will ignore the ‘not a unionist about the place’ dogma!

In pondering what comes next following her open willingness to collaborate with the SNP. Is this the start of Sinn Feins declared preference to be political buddies of the SNP and Plaid Cymru rather than commit to the B/GFA in genuine partnership with unionists at Stormont?

When therefore will we see Sinn Fein MPs sitting alongside the SNP and Plaid Cymru in the British Parliament?

Blatantly disrespecting the honour, integrity and legitimacy of the unionist community, wilfully abandoning the Agreement’s primacy and disavowing making NI-UK a better place for all-reflects the behaviour of separatists’ not partners. Is that the future nationalists have bought into by sacrificing the Agreement. “

Keir Starmer has announced that under-16s will be banned from social media, with regulations the government hopes Parliament will approve before Christmas and the ban taking effect by spring 2027 if Parliament agrees. It will follow the Australian model, covering user-to-user platforms built around social interaction and posting, including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X, though not messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal. The government says it will go beyond a blanket ban by switching off functions such as livestreaming and contact from strangers for under-16s across a wider range of services, including gaming, with those restrictions left on by default for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, and with curfews and breaks in infinite scrolling for under-18s still to be set out in July. The Prime Minister made his case in the language of childhood: social media is making children unhappy, is “designed to be addictive”, and is not a safe environment, so a full ban is, he said, “the right choice”. The consultation behind it drew more than 116,000 responses, with ninety per cent of parents backing a minimum age of sixteen.

I want to argue that, measured against the disorder of the past week, this is aimed at the wrong target. The problem is not that age restrictions address no real harm; children do face grooming, compulsive design and self-harm material, and a well-built age policy might reduce some of it. The problem is that the most serious public-order harms on this platform system are driven by adults, amplified by design, and left almost untouched by who is allowed to hold an account. The Prime Minister made his case entirely in the language of childhood and addiction, with not a word about the riots, the misinformation or the amplification that has run through Belfast over the past week. That disorder, the third such episode in two years, is the test this policy has to meet, and read against it, the ban changes who may use the platforms but leaves their amplifying design in place.

The people who drove it were adults

The most consequential amplification identified in the available reporting came from adults with large audiences. The current Belfast unrest followed a knife attack on the evening of 8 June, for which a Sudanese man was charged with attempted murder. Within hours, footage and a parallel stream of false claims, including that the victim was a child who had died, spread across Facebook, X and TikTok. Tommy Robinson posted a list of protest locations across Great Britain and Northern Ireland; Elon Musk reshared his call to protest; and Rupert Lowe pledged mass deportations and the return of the death penalty against those he called “barbarians”. Anonymous WhatsApp messages, on a service the ban explicitly leaves out, told men aged eighteen and over to be ready to fight, and a long list of home addresses said to house immigrants was circulated, which police said was putting lives at risk. The identifiable actors in this chain were adults, and the messages themselves were directed principally at adults. The ban nevertheless makes children the population directly regulated.

The 2025 Ballymena violence followed the same pattern. Loyalist Facebook pages shared protest details and false claims, rioters livestreamed arson, and a 32-year-old man was charged with sending menacing communications and with encouraging or assisting offences. One of the sharpest controversies of that episode concerned not a teenager but a minister: the Communities Minister, Gordon Lyons, was accused of inflaming tensions over a Facebook post about people moved to Larne Leisure Centre, which was later set alight, though he denied wrongdoing and said police had encouraged elected representatives to share the information. The merits of that dispute are for others to decide, but the basic point stands. When controversy can centre on the social-media conduct of an elected minister, excluding fifteen-year-olds from Instagram plainly does not reach the principal actors involved.

The origins of the present cycle make the same point. Amnesty International’s study of the 2024 riots records that the Southport murders were committed by a UK-born seventeen-year-old, and that false online claims recasting him as a Muslim asylum-seeker who had arrived by boat helped trigger and fuel the violence that followed. The precipitating harm was misinformation, generated and amplified principally by adults, with a minor at its centre, falsely described as the perpetrator rather than as a young user an age gate would catch.

The mechanism was amplification, not access

Amnesty’s analysis sets out how this works, using X’s publicly released 2023 ranking model. The system promotes posts based on predicted engagement rather than accuracy, rewarding replies and sustained argument far more than passive approval, while its main check, a user report, applies only after someone reports a post that may already have spread. Premium subscribers receive an additional ranking advantage, and Amnesty notes that several of the prominent accounts it examines, including those of Musk, Robinson, and Tate, carry paid verification badges. Amnesty is careful about the limits of this: the weights describe the 2023 public code rather than the live system across 2024 to 2026, and it accepts that crisis-period activity and ordinary resharing, not the algorithm alone, drove some of the reach. Even with those caveats, the reach it documents extended far beyond ordinary follower networks, with false posts about the Southport attacker’s identity gathering tens of millions of impressions within a day.

The case of Lucy Connolly shows the gap between this harm and the proposed remedy. On the evening of the Southport murders, she posted a message calling for hotels housing asylum-seekers to be set on fire. She deleted it herself after about three and a half hours, by which point, according to the Court of Appeal’s findings, it had been viewed 310,000 times and reposted 940 times from an account with around 9,000 followers. She was convicted of inciting racial hatred under section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986 and sentenced to thirty-one months, a sentence the Court of Appeal upheld in May 2025. Age-gating the platform’s youngest users would have changed none of this.

The authorities’ own conduct shows which instrument fits. After 2024, Ofcom’s chief executive, Dame Melanie Dawes, concluded in an open letter to the Secretary of State that such content “appears to have contributed to the significant violent disorder” after Southport, and pointed to the part played by virality and algorithmic recommendation in a crisis. The Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee reported in July 2025 that social-media business models incentivise the spread of dangerous content in a way that endangers public safety in the days after the murders, that the online safety regime has major holes, and that it is the companies and their recommendation algorithms that curate and amplify what users see. During the present unrest, Ofcom said some of the disorder appeared to have been incited online and that it was monitoring the situation and contacting providers under the Online Safety Act. In each emergency, the instrument chosen has been the design-facing one, backed by the prosecution of those who incite. An age threshold features nowhere in the response to the actual violence.

The case for the ban, and its limits

The serious argument for the ban is not that it would stop the riots. It is that adult production of harmful content and children’s exposure to it are distinct problems, and that a policy may sensibly reduce the second without solving the first. Removing children from particular recommendation systems could cut one audience for inflammatory or radicalising material, and children were not bystanders in this disorder: a thirteen-year-old was charged with rioting in Ballymena, around thirty youths set a bin alight in Ardoyne, and the Education Minister, Paul Givan, called it alarming that some schoolchildren had attacked the homes of their peers, while attendance collapsed at nearby schools.

That benefit is worth conceding, but it is narrow and uncertain. It does not reach the adults who create and amplify the content, nor does it change the systems that rank and distribute it to everyone who remains. Its scale and durability are unproven, and it is easily displaced to less visible or less regulated spaces, including Telegram and the private messaging that the ban excludes altogether, where some of the adult organising already runs. It is also worth being clear about what the law currently does and does not say. There is no statutory minimum age for using social media in the UK; the age of thirteen that is often cited is the age at which a child can consent on their own behalf to a service processing their data, where consent is the legal basis, not an access ban, and services can rely on other bases. The real weakness in existing controls is how easily they are evaded: Ofcom’s 2025 research estimated that 34 per cent of children aged eight to fifteen had their own profile on an online service reporting a user age of at least sixteen. The government says that keeping those functionality restrictions on by default for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds will prevent a cliff edge at sixteen, but it eases the transition in features rather than in access. The coalition of child-protection charities, online-safety groups, academics and bereaved families that opposed a blanket ban also warned of a cliff edge at sixteen, when young people could encounter high-risk platforms without acquired resilience. That concern has particular force where political radicalisation is involved. The clearest point of overlap between the package and the disorder is livestreaming: Ballymena rioters used it to broadcast arson. But that restriction is also age-limited and therefore misses the adults who did the broadcasting.

Age assurance and the risk of substitution

Enforcement will fall on the platforms rather than on children or parents, under the Australian-style model the government proposes: companies would have to take reasonable steps to keep under-16s off, using age-assurance methods such as photo-ID matching, facial age estimation or digital identity services. Self-declaration alone would not be sufficient. Each of those methods processes personal data, and the risks of exclusion, intrusive biometrics, and insecure identity data depend heavily on the architecture chosen. The Information Commissioner’s Office has called for privacy-preserving systems and warned against collecting more than is needed. Those concerns carry particular weight in a society where address lists were circulated during the present disorder, and where, during the 2025 Ballymena violence, Paul Reilly recorded minority-background residents placing Union flags on their doors to avoid being targeted. The point is not that age assurance resembles an ethnicity register, which it does not, but that the design of any mandatory age-assurance system deserves close scrutiny here rather than after the fact.

The bigger risk is political. The principal analyses considered here, from Amnesty, Ofcom, and the select committee, locate the remedy in platform design, transparency, and enforcement rather than in the age of users. The Molly Rose Foundation makes the same argument from the child-safety side, warning that a ban leaves the harder work on algorithms undone and offers parents a false sense of safety. The danger is that a visible, popular age measure is treated as though the structural problem has been dealt with, when the duties that bear most directly on amplification already sit within the Online Safety Act and depend on sustained, sufficiently robust enforcement.

Restricting access or regulating amplification

The riots are an adult-driven, design-amplified public-order problem, with a minor falsely recast online as an asylum-seeker at the origin of the 2024 episode rather than as a young user at its end. The ban the Prime Minister has now announced may do something for children on its own terms, and it should be judged on those terms rather than dismissed out of hand. But it does not reach the people who make and spread this material, it does not alter the systems that rank and distribute it, and its real risk is that it will be mistaken for the structural reform the evidence keeps pointing to. The question Belfast poses is not whether sixteen is the right age. It is whether the government is willing to regulate how these platforms amplify, or only who is allowed to use them.

Sources: Amnesty International (2025) UK: Technical Explainer on X’s Recommender System and the 2024 Racist Riots, EUR 45/0618/2025; Committee on the Administration of Justice and Rabble Cooperative (2025) ‘Inciting a Pogrom?’ Social Media and the Racist Disorder in Ballymena and beyond during summer 2025; House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee (2025) Social Media, Misinformation and Harmful Algorithms, Second Report of Session 2024–25, HC 442; House of Commons Library (2026) Proposals to ban social media for children, CBP 10468; Lucy Connolly v R [2025] EWCA Crim 657; Ofcom (2024) Letter from Dame Melanie Dawes to the Secretary of State, 22 October 2024; Ofcom (2025) Children’s User Age, Wave 4 (cited in CBP 10468); Reilly, P. (2025) ‘Ballymena violence fuelled by mainstreaming of far-right, not just social media’, University of Glasgow; Reilly, P. (2026) ‘Belfast unrest shows the power of social media as far-right views on immigration enter the mainstream’, The Conversation, 10 June 2026; BBC News (2026) ‘Under-16s to be banned from social media, Starmer announces’, 15 June 2026, and UK Government statement on the under-16s social media ban, 15 June 2026; BBC News NI (2026) ‘What we know about how Northern Ireland’s riots were organised’, 12 June 2026; ITV/UTV News (2025), reporting on arrests and school attendance during the Ballymena disorder; Molly Rose Foundation (2026) Joint statement from children’s and online safety organisations, experts and bereaved families on a social media ban for under-16s; Public Order Act 1986, s.19.

What you need to know

A recent poll from Gallup shows that Americans for example are less than enthusiastic about the prospect of having a data centre built in their local areas…

Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, including nearly half, 48%, who are strongly opposed. Barely a quarter favor these projects, with 7% strongly in favor…The centers cover large areas of land, require extensive amounts of electricity to operate and need substantial water to cool the equipment, raising concerns about their impact on the environment and local electric bills.

Gallup helpfully goes on to explain exactly why these centres generate such opposition

Opponents of data centers have more varied reasons for their position, but they focus mostly on environmental concerns. Half of opponents mention data centers’ excessive use of resources, including 18% each mentioning their use of water and energy. Sixteen percent mention a related environmental concern of pollution, including noise pollution and air and water pollution.

Data Centres of course are not just hosted in the US, but all over the worlds, with many governments competing to host the physical infrastructure of the coming digital world with one of the countries participating in the digital gold rush being the Republic of Ireland. Earlier this month the Irish Times ran a story on a report issued by the United Nations pointing out in their zeal to be at the forefront, the Republic has not adequately prepared its energy infrastructure to handle the vastly increased demand the Data Centres will impose…

The report highlights the heavy demand data centres place on Ireland’s energy systems, with 21 per cent of all electricity here used for data processing. That figure is forecast to grow to more than 30 per cent in the next few years as data centres expand to facilitate the huge processing capacity needed by AI, while proposed rules to let them provide their own electricity are expected to increase fossil-fuel use….Ireland is described as “a live cautionary example” of energy demand running ahead of infrastructure, with data centres using electricity equivalent to all urban households combined.

The article also quotes Nathan Quinlan of the School of Engineering at University of Galway saying that

We already have a steep hill to climb to build an energy system that’s compatible with a liveable climate and a thriving society, and become independent of volatile fossil fuel supplies…Ireland needs strong and purposeful decisions around our approach to this resource-intensive, aggressively expanding new industry that can potentially undermine our local and global efforts to avert the worst outcomes in the climate crisis.

The report itself, Environmental Cost of AI’s Energy Use: Carbon, Water and Land Footprints, can be found at here.

The Soapbox piece “The hurl was ours” put up on Saturday night, sets out to present an alternative advocacy for the working-class community of east Belfast through a significant qualification on the racist riots of this last week. It identifies personal credentials to authorativly speak on this:

I’ve lived in Belfast most of my life; I’m writing this listening to helicopters overhead for a second day. I know these streets, and I know these communities, and I know, looking at the footage from Tuesday night, exactly what I’m looking at – and it isn’t race hatred. Or not primarily. So, let’s talk about the men and boys on the Newtownards Road and across greater Belfast. The ones actually there, with the bottles and the masks. Who are they and why are they so ready?

But having said it’s going to be about the ones actually there, with the bottles and the masks her perspective pulls back to cover the entire east Belfast community that these rioters are only a part of, in a fallacy of composition where any chance of focused attention on their recourse to racist violence is drowned out under the slight of hand shifting of blame onto liberals and critics of loyalism and Unionism – the DUP is specifically mentioned:

A certain kind of liberal political culture in Northern Ireland has spent thirty years treating unionist working-class communities as either a punchline or a problem to be managed. The fuck-the-DUP aesthetic was fashionable for a long time. Mocking unionism, treating loyalist culture as inherently ridiculous, performing exasperation at people who voted the wrong way,

Some of the tropes we have become so familiar with through the Populist rhetoric of MAGA and the New Brexit Right are employed as a whole raft of others outside the community are “cancelled”. Critiquing the problematic act of voting for Brexit is identified. Those who bitterly still oppose the Windsor framework are somehow “justified” because its a loyalist trope that only going to be Lundies who would accept the necessary compromise. Not standing foursquare alongside the Loyalist inspired politics of the TUV and their English nationalist allies is diagnosed as somehow the real evil that has put rioters out onto the streets. The far right, its claimed, cannot culpable,

The far right didn’t build the peace walls. They didn’t design the segregated housing. They didn’t underfund the communities. They didn’t negotiate the protocol. They arrived on Tuesday with a lighter and found that someone else had already laid the bonfire. And believe you me, those men are not on X waiting for their next instruction from Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage.

All this rhetoric underneath the eloquence reduces down to a lightly disguised, “begging of the question”, a circulus in probando where her own subjective conclusions are being stated as confirming her case, the content of her actual argument. The culpability is directed elsewhere and almost imperceptibly, incidentally exonerates “the ones actually there, with the bottles and the masks” The character of the argument has become a painfully familiar experience today for those of us following world politics, where a strident claim to authenticity “as the authentic voice of a community” is deployed all too often to justify the unjustifiable. Reduced under the eloquence of her writing, with careful analysis, it’s a comparable argument not particularly dissimilar to the kind of “those Urban Townies cannot begin to understand why country people need to inflict cruelty on wild animals for their sport” trope. Physical violence against the virtually defenceless, the real underlying substance of last week’s news, is set aside with an abstracted argument placing all culpability on a loose body of reified generalisations

It is argued “I know, looking at the footage from Tuesday night, exactly what I’m looking at – and it isn’t race hatred. Or not primarily.” In my film career I worked a great deal with advertising over a couple of decades and recognise what may well  be an unconscious recourse to the tactics of the hidden persuaders. “Its not race hatred” sticks like a burr in the readers mind, the “or not primarily”, which follows this challenging claim, does not have an impact of denial, and almost instantly drops out of a readers memory. The regular reader comes away with the confusion of watching news of race attacks and rioting openly targeting by race on Belfast streets but with the message this is not really the intention of what their eyes are seeing.

But of course, it is, houses are burnt and people are terrorised out from their homes because of colour. This has been a recurring event in Loyalist controlled areas since the spike of the early 2010s when East and South Belfast gangs instigated race attacks, burning out families and forcing ethnic minorities to flee their homes. Incidents ranged from personal assaults to property destruction, targeting individuals from Polish, Romanian, and Chinese communities. For over a decade and a half the men and boys … with the bottles and the masks have increasingly attracted open praise from a growing extremist propaganda presence online, feeding them with social media tropes of Race Hate folded into that praise. And consider: someone, somewhere, has assembled and posted on social media lists of identified addresses of potential immigrant targets in Belfast that provides the mapping out of these riots. This is about considerably more than any spontaneous expression of frustration over unresolved depravation the author argues for.

There is certainly an argument somewhere else about the failure of our politicians over the quarter century of the Agreement, and I’ve made it myself but this failure is very far from being a unique experience for loyalist communities, and it’s the dark- Loyalist – culture … its machinery remained intact through thirty years of peace that actively controls and influences the streets and housing estates of these communities, sells them their drugs, oversees their bonfire building, and has a well recorded history of fermenting racist attacks.

“In 1996, the year that police began to compile statistics, there were 41 race hate incidents – but over the past 28 years that figure has soared. Between then and April 2025 there were 24,006 race hate incidents right across Northern Ireland, with last year’s figure the highest single year on record – 1,807.”

These attacks are usually identified with Loyalism by the PSNI. In the rush to act as an advocate for a community the author identifies with there is a  failure to fully digest the all-important facts that in so defectively blaming everyone, except those on the streets, the men and boys on the Newtownards Road and across greater Belfast. …the ones actually there, with the bottles and the masks, and all importantly in that one rhetorical flourish “and it isn’t race hatred”, when it is, glaringly, long fermented race hatred, providing a shockingly brutal outlet for the other more complex issues, the author is doing exactly what other oare being accused of doing. The rioters are being condesended to and the arsonists are being efaced by denying them agency for their own actions, in choosing to go out and riot, to throwing petrol bombs at people they, or others directing them, identify as different. Its not their fault, its other peoples.

When the communal loss of the dignity of work is referenced, and a glow of nostalgia around the lost industries painted, the author  is perhaps forgetting the exceptionally long hours of deeply alienating, repetitive work at the rope works and in Linen Mills, where treating the widespread health hazards of musculoskeletal disorders and respiratory problems placed Belfast Medicine at the fore-front of research into debilitating lung diseases from the 1850s. These illnesses were primarily due to relentless exposure of workers to flax dust, poor ventilation, and damp environments. Byssinosis, Tuberculosis (consumption), Emphysema and Bronchitis were endemic to Linen and Rope works workers, while the wet spinning rooms created a permanent wet room/sauna atmosphere that undermined workers health making the early death of young textile workers a commonplace in the city.

“Before the Troubles, there was something else being dismantled, more slowly, that never gets mentioned in the same breath. Harland and Wolff employed 35,000 people at its peak,”

The history of the two great shipyards and the place of their central role in the evolution of the sectarian cultures that led to the Covenant is become almost mythic today for the loyalist communities. During the autumn and winter of 1920 while “The Wee Yard” (Workman Clarke) had fed men to form the UVF units of the Shankill, Harland and Wolff had been the home ground of those elite loyalist militia units who, immediately post-Great War, would direct the sectarian monculturing of East Belfast, and other districts. I wrote about this on Slugger, only a few years back. The inheritance of this embedded tradition has expressed in the familiar riots that have echoed regularly down a century and the mythos of the men behind the 1920 expulsions is to be found in obvious echoes amongst what is  disingenuously described as the ones actually there, with the bottles and the masks.

What the author avoids examining fully is that it was not really the latte drinkers and Nationalists who are being pilloried in the article, but an economic realism in a changing world that closed the industries. It was not liberals doing this locally, it was the long-established Unionist governments of the 1950/60s who stood back as the newspapers of these post war decades published pages of business closures and bankruptcies. It was particularly the DUP of the Agreement era whose focus was ever fixed on the old song of sectarian cultural concerns, as the surviving infrastructure of these communities slowly toppled over the last quarter century It was not the liberals critical of unionist misrule but the communities cynical exploitation by the children of the first Paisleyites of the 1960s. These people are the representatives who presided over this, and it was the communities own votes and the old myth of their Lilliputian sectarian superiority still over Catholics fed down from their own fathers time by the hard boiled sardonic politicians of a Covenanter partitionist Ulster that turned their heads to look elsewhere, to be aggrieved against others as their own leadership played out its own agendas. Certainly, as she implies the worldwide boomer culture has dribbled away world resources in an orgy of bourgeois consumption but the real answers to the local issues that are being talking about are to be found rather in recognising the flawed nostalgia of repetedly valorising the stale traditional masculinity myths of industrial Belfast as an heroic identity she trots out here. These are difficult truths to face I know, but they are unavoidable.

It’s important to remember throughout all this that there is no free pass on justifying racism, and while the author in all sincerity may not believe this is what is being done, these generalisations and very specific rhetorical flourishes will instinctively be read in that way by many readers. Writing “this is not race hatred” very simply comes across strongest as exactly what it says, it cannot be excused by arguing that what may really be intended “this is considerably more than race hatred’ as it’s the simpler message that looks counter-intuitive that stands out when its read over by most casual readers.

The men and boys who were out on the streets blocking roundabouts, stopping those on long waiting lists reaching hospitals, the people who were throwing hate at “those of another race”, those who were petrol bombing homes, were very recognisably the direct descendants of the pogromists of 1912, 1920, 1935, 1969, 2011, the men and boys who had burnt their neighbours out of their homes. New slogans read online with all the glamour of endorsement by the most powerful men in the world may now have momentarily replaced the stale old slogans shot at these communities from Unionist platforms in 1912, but underneath remains in these acts of racism the same almost blind, visceral hated of others through which these men and boys were able to demonstrate violent power over in order to fill the gaping abyss of their private alienation and their daily experienced personal powerlessness in a world where others have all the power and the wealth that the media insidiously compels them to envy. The articles trajectory of blame mendaciously frames this culpability for their frustration in a reification named as “liberals and mockers” who are finger-posted clearly in the writing as the authentic source of their frustrations

Reading this vindication of what is being identified as existential frustration on the streets, it’s essential to remember that it’s not actually the whole Unionist/Loyalist community shouting and enacting their hate. Stopping the city nodal points, burning out families, it’s still individuals with their own names and faces, their own personal politics, hiding amongst these mobs and unreasonably appropriating the public voice of their whole community.

The suspect, a 30-year-old Sudanese national named Hadi Alodid, was overpowered by several quick-thinking bystanders, one armed with a hurl. While their actions undoubtedly saved Ogilvie’s life, he has been left with devastating, life-changing injuries, including the loss of his left eye.

The public conversation invariably turned to immigration. This attack was seen as a physical manifestation of long-held concerns regarding what some have termed the “mass immigration” of “undocumented migrants” into Northern Ireland, with similar incidents having occurred in the Republic. Such was the velocity of the online rumour mill that it churned out everything from false claims that the victim had died to errors regarding the suspect’s nationality (not helped by a police statement) and his “undocumented status.” It has also been succinctly noted that many of these anti-immigration groups, which profess concerns for local residents and women, contain prominent members with serious criminal convictions, often including violence against women.

State records paint a completely different picture. Alodid arrived in Belfast by bus from Dublin on 10 February 2023, formally claiming asylum that same day. His application was subsequently approved on 28 September of the same year, granting him official refugee status and the right to remain in the UK until 2028.

A less-reported aspect of this case is why his asylum application was approved so rapidly, what checks were actually conducted and who if anybody will ultimately be held to account.

It appears the Belfast attacker was processed under a fast-track asylum policy introduced by the then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick. A letter from Jenrick to the UK Statistical Authority on 17 April 2023 explicitly stated:

“We are taking urgent action to accelerate decision-making and speed up processing times. We are simplifying and modernising our system, including introducing shorter, more focused interviews; making guidance more accessible; dealing with cases more swiftly where they can be certified as manifestly unfounded; recruiting extra decision makers; and allocating dedicated resources for specific nationalities.”

A disgruntled public will conclude that this points to a systemic failure in an asylum process that successive governments have been unable to tackle. With Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman now tipped to head up immigration policy within a potential Reform government, it seems highly likely that old structural problems will simply be repeated.

Ironically, Jenrick was one of the first political figures to comment on the stabbing, stating:

“We’ve woken up to truly barbaric footage on a street in Belfast. Of a kind you’d think you’d never see in this country. For years now I’ve urged the police to spell out the basic, sober facts, as they have them, when there are horrors like this.”

Jenrick, however, was far from alone in using this attack to advance his own political cause and potentially deflect from past failures. A spate of online accounts that have historically never given a fiddler’s fig about Northern Ireland suddenly expressed deep concern. Yet, this toxicity was not confined to the anti-immigration side, nor did it all originate outside of Northern Ireland.

Once the video surfaced, many local pro-immigration commentators were quick to downplay the attack by making unhelpful comparisons to the Shankill Butchers, while others pointed out that a number of local women had been brutally murdered in recent times to less public outrage. Just over a week prior, in Hazelbank Park, police had seized knives from a group of men who claimed to be performing a religious dance. Defenders of that incident quickly pointed to Orangemen carrying swords in processions. The comparison is structurally flawed: an unsanctioned event in a public park is illegal; carrying a ceremonial sword in an approved parade that is policed is not.

This false equivalence highlights the core issue of trying to have a mature discussion on immigration in Northern Ireland: it almost instantly boils down to the comfortable, tribal optics of Orange and Green. Through this predictable lens, commentators can easily advance their own pre-existing ideologies.

Many figures suggested the primary issue was merely online misinformation, pointing the finger at Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson. While online misinformation is undoubtedly a massive problem, the anxieties surrounding immigration are being witnessed and expressed in the real world. When individuals choose to incite riots, they aren’t looking to Tommy Robinson, Elon Musk or even Nigel Farage for inspiration. They are pointing to what they perceive as an elite political and journalistic class that repeats the same tired tropes, blaming Musk, the far right or deflecting by weaponising past atrocities to push an agenda.

Predictably, the subsequent riots have done absolutely nothing to legitimately raise concerns around immigration or the flaws in Alodid’s asylum application. Instead, they have resulted in innocent people, mostly blameless migrants, being attacked and, in some cases, burned out of their homes. This violence will now be the defining headline to come from the original brutal attack, and understandably so; there can be no justification for rioting, and there will be a heavy onus on the police to secure a significant number of arrests.

The ultimate frustration for those who oppose the riots but harbour genuine concerns about immigration is that the violence has let politicians completely off the hook. Instead of having to answer difficult, structural questions regarding the asylum system, local politicians can simply condemn the rioters while ignoring the underlying policy failures entirely. This is great for social media likes and instant gratification, but it creates a dangerous political vacuum. By hiding behind empty party platitudes, politicians are feeding a growing discontent within the working-class communities most impacted by these shifts.

Because immigration policy is not a devolved matter, local politicians are handed an incredibly easy ride. They are free to shout “refugees welcome,” “diversity is our strength” or “deport them all” from the sidelines, entirely shielded from any real consequence or responsibility.

The Alliance Party has come under sustained criticism, with opponents branding its approach as “pro-open borders.” Alliance figures reject this, maintaining that their policies aim to create safer migration routes and speed up vetting. While it would be unjust to attribute individual crimes to the party, the emphasis on faster processing has drawn renewed scrutiny. In the wake of recent events, this aspect of Alliance’s platform warrants reconsideration; promoting accelerated decision-making without robust safeguards risks severely compromising public confidence.

Sinn Féin finds itself in an even more precarious position. Officially, the party remains staunchly pro-immigration, framing its stance as a natural extension of its republican ideology to stand against the oppression of minorities, although some, particularly unionists, will scoff at this. Privately, there is also a strategic hope that supporting minority communities will foster a reciprocal solidarity when the time comes for a border poll.

Yet, as shifting demographics begin to alter traditional republican strongholds, grassroots support for this platform is, at best, uneasy. While Sinn Féin’s electoral dominance in Northern Ireland currently remains rock-solid ahead of the next Assembly elections, its fortunes in the Republic have dramatically soured. By walking a perilous tightrope on immigration south of the border, the party leadership has triggered a severe disconnect with its core working-class base, causing its polling numbers to plummet.

Some of the most nuanced and prescient analysis of this systemic failure has come from Gerry Lynch, a former Executive Director of the Alliance Party and current Church of England rector. Long before the violence erupted, Lynch warned that Northern Ireland was sitting on an immigration powder keg, a warning that has now been vindicated.

Gerry Lynch has been scathingly honest about the intellectual cowardice of officialdom and the liberal-left, noting that it required no political genius to see how this situation could explode, but it did require an ability to speak honestly about the reality on the ground. As Lynch observed:

“Officialese has no vocabulary to describe localised ethnic conflict in any terms other than the idea that if beastly White bigots weren’t so beastly, then everything would be alright. Nationalist, Alliance and Green politicians who can discuss conflict between Republicans and Loyalists in frank and adult terms in both public and private suddenly retreat behind slogans once anyone from outside NI is involved.”

This selective blindness is exactly what allows local representatives to hide behind empty platitudes. By reducing a complex, systemic policy failure down to a simplistic moral fable about “bigotry,” they evade the tough, structural conversations the public is crying out for. Many argue as well that those pushing hardest for these policies are characteristically insulated from having to live with their real-time consequences.

Lynch’s analysis of the republican dilemma is equally sharp. He notes that Sinn Féin’s pro-immigration status is meeting real resistance among its supporters in the North, and “much more so with their supporters in the Republic, where Sinn Féin voters are noticeably much more sceptical of immigration within opinion polls than the other large parties.”

While the political left hides behind slogans, loyalists and unionists have received the lion’s share of criticism following Monday’s brutal attack. Some of this commentary has been lazy and generic—shoehorning in historical atrocities, referencing the Shankill Butchers or dismissing working-class unionist communities as an uneducated underclass or “colonial settlers.” Ironically, much of this abuse comes from people who describe themselves as champions of truth, kindness and humanity. For many on the receiving end, such derision is water off a duck’s back; historical experience shows that this kind of external elitism only serves to embolden them.

However, what cannot be dismissed or ignored is that the vast majority of the subsequent serious rioting, racist assaults on migrant homes and overt criminality did originate from within loyalist communities. We must speak honestly about the deep-seated issues within these areas: from the pervasive, overriding control of paramilitaries to the historically passive presence of mainstream unionist politicians. Social deprivation, high unemployment rates and a profound, generational feeling of being “left behind” have created a volatile environment. Many feel their communities are being forced to absorb the rapid outworkings of an immigration policy to which they never consented. This does not excuse the rioting; it merely seeks to add necessary context.

This represents a total failure of political representation, the vacuum of which has been filled by violence. While unionist politicians have openly and rightly condemned the rioting, the situation requires far more than passive condemnation. It demands direct, hands-on intervention by unionist leaders to confront the twin blights of paramilitarism and criminality, ensuring these communities feel genuinely enfranchised by the democratic process rather than abandoned to the streets where paramilitaries exploit the youth.

The DUP will counter that they have been attempting to confront these issues politically for years. Their representatives frequently complain that whenever genuine concerns regarding infrastructure or demographic pressures are raised, they are instantly met with a chorus of “racism” from political opponents, a knee-jerk reaction that effectively kills off a conversation that desperately needs to happen.

This gridlock was perfectly illustrated this week. When First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly insisted that the suspect, if found guilty, should face deportation, and DUP leader Gavin Robinson condemned the incident as “barbaric violence,” both were instantly subjected to intense online criticism for their choice of words. It was a stark reminder that, for a vocal segment of officialdom, immigration remains a taboo topic, entirely shielded from critical analysis.

While society rightly seeks to ensure that all migrants are not tarred with the same brush as those involved in criminal behaviour, that same nuance has not been extended to unionists and loyalists, who are too easily scapegoated, demonised and ridiculed as a monolithic whole. Furthermore, it has been noted that not all of the protesters or those engaging in serious racial abuse were from a unionist background. While unionists can take the lion’s share of criticism for the street violence, others cannot dismiss this as a solely unionist issue. With dissatisfaction regarding current immigration frameworks growing rapidly within nationalist areas, the scale of the problem is becoming concerning.

Whilst officialdom tends to repeat the mantra that Northern Ireland broadly favours immigration, the raw numbers reveal a different reality. In landmark academic polling data, only 18% of Unionists, 20% of Nationalists and 30% of “Neithers” agreed that immigration has benefited the economy and society. While it is certainly true that unionism is statistically more opposed immigration than others, it is entirely false to suggest it is exclusively unionism that harbours deep anxieties around the issue.

Crucially, law-abiding migrants moving into Northern Ireland are not finding the situation easy either; they are being let down by the system just as severely as native residents. Consider the experience of close family friends who were subjected to ongoing, daily terror while living in Belfast, entirely instigated by a single neighbour. Despite presenting the police with comprehensive video evidence of racism, verbal abuse, vandalism and explicit threats of physical violence, the system failed them. The police charged the perpetrator but bailed him directly back to his home address, simply because the state had nowhere else to house him.

Predictably, while on bail, he continued his campaign of terror, ultimately forcing the family to flee Belfast entirely. The family were abandoned not just by the justice system, but by the very commentators who routinely echo loud slogans about refugees being welcome, yet who were conspicuously absent in this family’s hour of need.

This exposes a deeply unfair, hierarchical reality within the modern immigration process. Those who meticulously follow the rules, enter the country legally and remain law-abiding citizens are subjected to intense bureaucratic scrutiny. Meanwhile, those who flout immigration rules face few, if any, repercussions. When frustrated locals lashing out accuse all immigrants of breaking the rules, the nuances and realities are lost entirely.

As always, the police find themselves at the absolute forefront of this crisis, routinely receiving far more than their fair share of the blame. The toxic nature of the online reaction was clear from the outset. Bad actors initially claimed that the brave bystander who warded off the attacker with a hurl had subsequently been arrested, a complete fabrication peddled aggressively by anti-immigration accounts to stoke anger.

Compounding this, under immense immediate pressure due to the circulating video footage, the police released an initial statement that inaccurately described the suspect as a “Somalian” national. The PSNI now find themselves trapped in a systemic no-win situation. For years, the operational policy surrounding migrant crime has generally been to omit a suspect’s background or nationality from initial press releases. When they adhere to this policy, they are accused of an intentional cover-up, and the public instantly fills the vacuum by assuming the suspect is a migrant. Yet, when they do release specific details, they are instantly accused of stoking racist divisions.

This friction is not unique to Belfast. In Enniskillen, Bibin Matthew, a care worker convicted of assaulting a vulnerable resident, fled the jurisdiction and “returned home” before he could be sentenced. In the aftermath, the police were heavily blamed for a supposedly lax approach to migrant crime. In reality, the police were acting within the constraints of the judicial and bail process. They do not write the legislation; they merely enforce it, yet they are left to bear the public brunt of an impossible situation.

What these flashpoints have ultimately exposed is how woefully underfunded and under-resourced the PSNI truly is. Leaving our frontline justice system this exposed represents yet another catastrophic political failure of local and national governance.

Much like the earlier Ballymena unrest, the Belfast riots have followed a depressingly predictable sequence: an incident of suspected migrant crime, followed by a torrent of online accusations, defensive political deflections and, ultimately, street violence and condemnation. The rioting remains the only thing that lingers in the public consciousness, and there is a profound, justifiable concern that Northern Ireland has now entered a toxic cycle.

There is currently nothing to suggest that many of our politicians possess the stomach to discuss immigration policy in a meaningful, adult manner, let alone use their leverage to influence Westminster accordingly. It remains a uniquely radioactive issue, where the career risks of being branded a racist are simply deemed too great. From a human standpoint, it is completely understandable why many would avoid it, but silence ultimately leads to further problems. Trust in politics is so low at the moment that a letter released by the victim’s family was dismissed by some as containing the unmistakable “fingerprints of bureaucratic speak” whilst an at best clumsy corporate statement from Belfast City Council, which sanitised Monday’s brutal attack as merely an “incident” and failed to even reference the victim, resulted in similar public ridicule.

Ultimately, the tragedy of the Belfast riots is twofold. First, in the inexcusable violence meted out against innocent people. Second, in the fact that the smoke from these burning buildings has provided the perfect cover for a failing political class. Until our leaders, both in Westminster and Stormont, abandon comforting slogans and confront the real-world consequences of immigration policies, inadequate policing and overstretched infrastructure, the underlying fractures will remain unaddressed. Failing to meaningfully address and influence immigration policy in Northern Ireland is what will really fuel far-right agitators and online bad actors. The powder keg has flashed, but the fuse is still burning.

Just two rules. Keep it civil and no man/woman playing.

Comments will close at 12 pm on Monday.

So discuss what you like here, but no politics.

Comments will close at 12 pm on Monday.

The  shock resignation of  the ever loyal, ever dependable John Healey and his armed forces minister Al Carns may have settled Keir Starmer’s fate. Healey  left the strong impression that the financial  settlement he was offered for  implementing a radical Strategic Investment Review  was  the crucial final deal. But not so, it was just a timely and important stage on the way to what many fear. -the Treasury included  –   is another Defence bottomless pit .

Healey damned Starmer for being too weak to practice what he preached

… you have been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.

You know what defence needs. You made the argument for this powerfully in your speech at the Munich Security Conference back in February. Without a DIP that meets the moment in this way, I am being forced to make decisions that would reduce the readiness of our Forces and increase the risk to personnel on operations, and could make the country less safe.

But the fundamentals of strategic assumptions are barely questioned. They should be. As Healey wrote in his resignation letter to Starmer.

it is our intelligence assessment, and the assessment of other countries in NATO, that there could be an attack by Russia on NATO as soon as 2030.”

This case is taken for granted in  the Defence Review. It should be challenged. Is it credible that Russia under Putin or a similarly minded successor, having lost  up to half a million men in the war against Ukraine for a few slivers of territory  would  think it just the thing to invade a slice of Nato, the Baltic states or Finland or Poland? Even he made some gains at Ukraine’s  expense in any peace deal?

These countries on Nato’s eastern flank  suffered wars and invasion from Russia for centuries right up to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. They are now arming to the teeth to prevent any recurrence, bolstered by the celebrated Article 5  of the NATO charter pledging all members to defend each other. Trump’s refusal to finance Ukraine’s defence of Russian invasion put the wind up the whole alliance which has now agreed to take over funding US weaponry for Ukraine. You don’t have to believe that Nato’s absorption of the Warsaw Pact was to blame for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,  to prevent Ukraine from joining the opposing club . But Ukraine joining Nato would have been a provocation too far and won’t happen.

So how great really is the threat from Russia?  Continual  hostile acts , cutting undersea comms  cables, aggressive buzzing of Nato planes in international territory,  even just  across Nato borders,  multiple cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns,  novichock poisoning, mysterious assassinations in western countries. No question, a hostile posture. On top of which nuclear arms limitation treaties  have been allowed to lapse. But not  exactly Stalingrad or the battle of Kursk in a war of survival which left over 20 million dead.

Up to half a million Russian  dead in  Ukraine is still a fearsome toll  Ukrainians fewer  but perhaps not by much. Toll figures ranging widely  are part of the propaganda war . But the fact remains that the case for an attack on Nato has not been made out.   Claiming threats is what defence experts do. They project a monstrous hypothesis into reality and invoke the theory of  deterrence that prevailed during the Cold War over nuclear weapons. What would we do it Putin threatened to use nuclear weapons to counter Nato members  financing Ukraine and tightening   sanctions against him? Tool up in kindis the answer. It would be too cynical to assert they use their rareified expertise to put the frighteners on politicians and people  to screw more money out of the system. These people are sincere along the intellectual tramlines of the  discipline called Defence.

Nuclear fears are perhaps surprisingly not at the heart of Nato’s posture and what the UK Defence Review is mainly about.. They’re still spooked by the years of appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s when rearmament began only just in time to build just enough fighter planes for the Battle of Britain. This was coupled with a secret admission from the defence chiefs that overstretched Britain could not defend its Empire  across two oceans, Yet heavy traces of post imperial delusions persist.

As the FT writes:.

For decades, Britain has sought to maintain the military of a great power on the budget of a medium-sized one. The departure of Healey, and the subsequent resignations of armed forces minister Al Carns and two ministerial aides at the Ministry of Defence, have exposed the inevitable tension. At the heart of the debate is not just how much the UK should spend on the military, but what types of threat it faces — and ultimately, its place in the world.

The numbers are daunting: Britain’s defence budget stood at about £60bn last year. The strategic defence review (SDR), published in 2025 and intended to define military priorities for the coming ten years, laid out a shopping list that officials estimate could require roughly £68bn extra over the next decade or so…

All told, estimates from inside the MoD have suggested a gap of about £28bn between the ambitions of the SDR and current planned spending. Many experts believe the shortfall is significantly larger. But the forthcoming Defence Investment Plan, promised before the next Nato summit in Ankara on July 7, so far is understood to propose only £13.5bn in additional funds, meaning huge cuts would have to be found elsewhere in the defence budget. That has spurred the ministerial resignations..

Meanwhile, the experience in Ukraine has challenged old assumptions about warfare. Cheap drones, electronic warfare and long-range precision strikes have inflicted devastating losses on traditional armoured units. Nato’s way of fighting, some have suggested, may be obsolete.

 Ben Judah, former spad to David Lammy as foreign secretary offers a  even sharper  critique.  

Really what we’ve seen with the Defence Investment Plan is a failure to make a choice. This is why. The UK is committed to four major defence projects: • Renewing our nuclear force • Meeting our NATO commitments • The AUKUS submarine project with 🇺🇸🇦🇺 • The new GCAP fighter jet with 🇯🇵🇮🇹 You cannot afford that at current spend. You either need to drop one or move up to 2.5% GDP rapidly to keep up. It you don’t want to drop one — with all the diplomatic pain and security exposure that comes with it — you have to decide how to fund it and there are only two options: • Borrowing hitting future taxpayers • New taxes hitting current taxpayers But 2.5% of GDP is not even the sum necessary for war readiness rearmament — all those drone, AI, equipment and manpower upgrades — which is at a minimum 3% and probably closer to 3.5%. What went wrong is the Strategic Defence Review said yes to all four projects, the government then adopted the rhetoric and diplomatic posture of war readiness rearmament but failed to make a decision on how to pay for all this — costing us merely one Defence Secretary, one Armed Forces Minister and the government’s credibility when it comes to defence. And that’s before a serious attempt has even been made to build a totally new procurement and delivery process to confront the fact the MoD is the Ministry of Armed HS2s, highly unlikely to deliver rearmament without insane overspend.

“Ministry of HS2” ouch! Or this from the Centre for British Progress.

MI6 ‘s view is more nuanced. The new MI6  chief  and first woman in the post, the  suitably exotically named  Blaise  Metreweli noted: “The export of chaos is a feature not a bug in this Russian approach to international engagement.. The defining challenge of the 21st century”  (is) “not simply who wields the most powerful technologies, but who guides them with the greatest wisdom. Power itself is becoming more diffuse, more unpredictable as control over these technologies is shifting from states to corporations, and sometimes to individuals,” 

What does Burnham think? Fairly cloudy it appears  but with a hint of a trade off – in the long term – according to a Times Interview

Does he agree with Healey that the £13.5 billion pledged by the prime minister is not enough?

“The world has changed, it’s obvious to anybody who looks at it, and we are going to have to change the assumptions on which we’ve been working,” he says. “I would say it’s defence and security but also resilience.”

It is at this point that Burnham begins to set out one of the first planks of his plans for power. He thinks that there needs to be not just a ten-year approach to defence and security, but a ten-year approach to public investment and procurement. As part of the plan, all public procurement would have to include a measurable commitment to “social value”, such as work placements and apprenticeships for young people.

“Social value” sounds even more expensive. Economic value . i.e. real high tech defence jobs after making hard headed strategic choices, is a better bet.   The UK ‘s defence indusiry laid  on a showcase of their wares in the former Honda factory in Swindon –  in what  is to become the largest drones factory in Europe. It weas to be the occasion for Starmer and Healey together  to announce the Defence Investment Plan. It was more than a PR disaster. What will happen next is up in the clouds.

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We have faced a somewhat longer road. Whilst the Labour government has brought in and begun enacting reforms, it was two years ago and in the teeth of the election that brought Labour to power that then economy minister Conor Murphy proposed a package of reforms to our own employment laws. As per the BBC report at the time…

From The Times

The UK has returned only one asylum seeker to Ireland since a post-Brexit deal was signed in 2020 and the government is now preparing to crack down on the border route being used as a “back door” for illegal immigration after the Belfast attack.

Home Office insiders said the common travel area (CTA) with Ireland was “a massive Achilles’ heel” as concerns rose over illegal migrants taking advantage of the lack of routine immigration checks to enter the UK.

There are 2,370 asylum seekers in supported accommodation in Northern Ireland, 2.5 per cent of all asylum seekers across the UK. 

Jonathan Hall, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said the human rights of asylum seekers were often being prioritised over national security. 

The UK Home Office revealed overnight that in the past year it had apprehended more than 900 “immigration offenders” abusing the open land border.

The Dublin government had a prompt reply

Data from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) in Dublin, however, showed 18,500 people had sought asylum in 2024, of which 90% were thought to have travelled from Great Britain to Ireland via a flight or ferry to Belfast.

Before 2019, the number of people seeking asylum in Ireland was relatively small, about 5,000, commensurate with the experience of a small country on the farthest outreaches of Europe.

That number grew significantly between 2022 and 2024, when it peaked at 18,500. Just 10% of people applied for asylum at an airport or port, while 90% made a first-time application in person at the International Protection Office in Dublin. This figure includes some who may have entered the country legally and days, weeks or months later sought asylum.

In 2025 and 2026 to date, the proportion of asylum seekers applying at the office in person were 88% and 90% respectively.

Without physical checks on the Irish border, neither the UK nor Irish governments can verify the precise numbers of people crossing the border illegally, but in 2024 Ireland’s then justice minister, Helen McEntee, said publicly that 80% were coming over the land border.

Where does that leave us? In NI there are 65,000 “ people of colour”. 124,000 mainly white born outside the UK, mainly from the EU. Irish travellers 2610, Roma 1259.

In the Republic  23.5% foreign born including UK, Asian 3.3%, Black Irish 1.5%. The Republic’s population has expanded dramatically  in line with growing prosperity from 2.8 mn in 1961, to 5.4 mn last year, and projected to rise to 6.7 mn by 2060.

All manageable, surely –   although the new EU-Irish immigration rules llook very complicated and slow  

This  population rise  in the Republic since the WW2  has not  yet kept pace with the rise in Northern Ireland’s population which began with the  introduction  of the Welfare State in 1948, as my namesake Prof Brian Mercer Walker points out slightly mischieviously  in the Irish Times today.

 David Mc Williams described graphically the mass emigration which afflicted the new Irish state in its first 50 years (“Britain was a saviour for Irish migrants. One of those sons will captain England next week,” June 6th). By 1961, an estimated 45 per cent of all those born in Ireland between 1926 and 1936 had left.

It is interesting to note that Northern Ireland in the same period did not face this problem. The government of Northern Ireland can be rightly criticised for not creating an inclusive society or ensuring full civil rights for all.

At the same time, this government pursued policies which brought benefits for every citizen, unionist and nationalist. In their social policies, unionist ministers, especially John M Andrews, insisted with the London treasury that as part of the UK its people were entitled to parity in social services and equal standards with elsewhere in the UK.

Following the Butler Act in Britain, the Education Act (Northern Ireland) 1947, gave free secondary education for all, which was not available in the South until the 1960s. The National Health Service, established in 1949, benefited everyone….

The failings of Northern Ireland in its first 50 years are well known. Its benefits and successes, due to these effective government policies, deserve attention.

Today, the situation is very different. With new Irish government social and economic policies, the southern population has grown remarkably. Still, viewed over the last 100 years, the rate of population growth in the South has yet to catch up with the North. 

  One violent attack  by an immigrant or anybody else is one too many.  Close coordination between the two governments  over policing and data sharing is plainly the right approach. The open  border survived Brexit and will survive race riots. Despite the disaster of Brexit my ideal remains interchangeability  of government arrangements and citizenship in these islands.  On the present situation,  this comment by James Nancy in the Bele Tel deserves an extended extract.

 Violent crimes in Northern Ireland elicit responses so well rehearsed as to have become ritualised: clichéd language running deep and deadening grooves into our collective consciousness.

Every time a woman is murdered in her home — almost always by a white Northern Irish man she knows well — we can set our watches by the expressions of concern that flow from political leaders who then seem to forget about institutionalised misogyny within days.

And so too have racist riots become an annual occurrence in the North, a predictable consequence any time someone of a minority background is accused of a serious crime.

Last year, there were the nights of rioting in Ballymena, which were themselves a sort of horrific reprise of the year before, when minority citizens of Belfast were burned out of their homes and businesses by mobs.

Because of this history, there was a sickening sense of inevitability building through Tuesday as people waited for the calls to go out on social media for protests, for the injunction by politicians to behave “responsibly”, and for the very real safety fears of minority communities to get only a passing mention in a tokenistic, rhetorical gesture towards the notions of basic decency and human empathy.

The political rhetoric surrounding these incidents has become utterly bizarre and full of a confused grammar than betrays both personal and moral cowardice…..

There are reports of “fires targeting homes”, with the sentence structure making it seem as if flames are a sentient body capable of attacking families in their residences. (Perhaps the PPS can launch a case against the tendency of carbon-based substances to burn, or charge the chemical process of change with attempted murder?)

There has too been another round of “legitimate concerns” about immigration raised, which are based on views so comically untrue that no satire of Facebook bigotry could best them.

How many rounds of arson and violence do the minority citizens of Belfast have to live through before the leaders of political unionism learn some reasonable hesitancy and become more concerned with safety than with the prospect of offending far-right activists on social media?

… The key issue is that racist mobs keep trying to murder minorities in our city. The problem is that pogroms have become functionally permitted by our political culture, treated as a seemingly tolerable annual tradition or seasonal occurrence: a sort of perverted Morris dance that leaders are ready to jig along to if it means they can keep making false statements about immigration.

There is much to be done to tackle racism and intercommunal tension in Belfast, but the first and easiest course of action is a change in our leaders’ rhetoric about minorities.

The cost of creating a safer and more tolerant city is no higher than politicians learning to speak responsibly and for them to start treating the safety of minorities with the same care they currently take to avoid offending internet racists.

The latest Northern Ireland Homelessness Bulletin (October 2025 – March 2026) Northern Ireland Homelessness Bulletin October 2025 – March 2026 | Department for Communities reveals that temporary accommodation placements increased to 6,714 households, up from 5,691 during the same period last year — an increase of almost 18%.

This matters because homelessness is not measured solely by the number of people who seek help. A housing system can appear relatively stable on the surface while deteriorating significantly underneath if households are unable to move through the system and into permanent accommodation.

That is what the latest figures suggest is happening in Northern Ireland.

The number of households presenting as homeless increased only modestly, rising from 7,637 to 7,836 compared with the same six-month period last year, while homelessness acceptances remained broadly stable. However, there has been a significant increase in temporary accommodation over the last five years which points to growing pressure on the housing market.

Temporary accommodation is designed to provide short-term stability while permanent housing solutions are identified. Yet rising placement numbers suggest that more families and individuals are becoming trapped waiting for a property because suitable homes simply are not available.

The fundamental problem behind this is Northern Ireland is not building enough social housing to meet demand. Social housing waiting lists remain historically high and affordability pressures in the private rented sector are making it harder to secure a home.

The impact is often felt most acutely in inner-city neighbourhoods, where demand for affordable housing is greatest and deprivation levels are frequently higher. Inner-city communities are disproportionately affected by shortages in social housing because more households depend on affordable rented accommodation and face greater barriers to accessing housing.

One of the major constraints on building new homes is the severe limitations in public foul drainage and wastewater infrastructure.

Across large parts of Northern Ireland, homes cannot be built where wastewater systems lack the capacity to permit new connections. This means that even where land is available, planning permission has been secured and funding exists, housing developments can still face delays or be unable to proceed because the sewerage network cannot accommodate additional demand.

This creates a vicious circle whereby social housing delivery struggles to keep pace with demand, resulting in more households becoming trapped in temporary accommodation and increased pressure on homelessness services.

A recent Irish News report confirmed that, in response to a written Assembly question at Stormont, Communities Minister Gordon Lyons acknowledged the scale of the challenge. The Minister confirmed that more than 40% of planned social homes are facing potential delays because of inadequate wastewater infrastructure, while almost 2,000 new social homes cannot currently proceed due to sewage system constraints. He described water infrastructure restrictions as a “key barrier to housing supply.”

This matters because Northern Ireland’s homelessness challenge is increasingly becoming an infrastructure issue as much as a housing issue.

Therefore, the homelessness crisis cannot be viewed by policymakers and politicians in isolation. It must take account of the significant blockages caused by infrastructure constraints and the funding pressures facing the social housing sector. A cross-party and cross-departmental response is required to tackle this challenge; otherwise, the evidence suggests the problem is likely to worsen in the years ahead.

The TV footage from Belfast this week was striking. On TV news we watched wave after wave of young men, all dressed in black, wearing balaclavas, advancing on police Land Rovers to stone the PSNI. The choice of dark clothing was no accident and it serves a purpose

In advance of the rioting on Tuesday, there was a call on social media and Whatsapp for “men of the age of 18 and over to wear dark clothing and be prepared to fight or be arrested”. If you are involved in a riot, getting everyone to wear the same uniform of black clothing and balaclavas will confuse their identities and make it very difficult for the police to identify any individual rioter. As a side effect, it creates a striking image of unity for the rioters, almost like a perverse form of school uniform.

Such tactics are not new. During the 1930s when Mussolini was trying to seize power in Italy, he famously got his armed thugs to wear black shirts and to attack their political opponents in street battles. The Blackshirts armed themselves with wooden clubs and used systematic violence to crush trade unions, political rivals and violently purge ethnic minorities. After Mussolini came to power his tactics were copied in Britain and Germany.

The Malign Effect of Rich Elites

In Britain, the rich elite tried to take power using the British Union of Fascists (BUF) set up in 1932 under Sir Oswald Mosley. When Oswald Mosely spoke, his own Blackshirts were used to beat up and subdue anyone who opposed him.

Despite coming from a privileged background, Mosely persuaded the working-class men that their country was in decline, that outsiders (Jewish people in this case) were dragging their country down. Mosely promised to end the “decay” of British capitalism and parliamentary democracy. He was going to end unemployment, protect British wages and was going to use Tariffs on foreign goods to do this. Effectively, he was going to make Britain great again.

Similarly in Germany, Adolf Hitler got his thugs to dress up in brown shirts, rather than black, and attack political opponents, trades unions and Jewish minorities. He was going to make Germany great again, and we know where this led.

One of the earliest concentration camps was at Dachau near Munich, and was set up initially to provide ‘protective detention’ and re-education for left wing opponents of Hitler, but quickly transformed into an extermination camp. When I went on a tour of this camp at the end of May, what struck me about its earlier days was the level of bullying involved, with an early camp leader being sacked because he was insufficiently cruel.

Who is Manipulating Us?

Just as Britain rejected the Blackshirts at the end of the 1930s, I believe we will today reject the blackshirts rioting on our streets. However, we are safer and this process will be faster if we are aware of the dangers.

Today we have some foolish local politicians being led by rich and powerful elites from outside N. Ireland, people who are determined to manipulate our people into actions that will harm us all. The same people who told us that Brexit would solve our anxiety over immigration and make us all richer are now, ten years later, telling us that closing our borders is the solution to our problems, that it is a tiny number of brown neighbours who are causing our problems.

These rich people need to completely detach the UK from the EU; they want to remove all the protections that our workers have under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). These include

• The Right to Form and Join Trade Unions:
• The Right to Collective Bargaining.
• The Right to Strike
• The Right to Privacy at Work – restricting excessive monitoring of employee’s personal email or phone usage.
• The Right to Whistleblowing – exposing dangerous or illegal work practices.

In addition, they do not want the UK to copy the EU in imposing restrictions on large tech monopolies that trade in this country but pay little tax and exploit their workforce.

A Different Experience of Immigration

Almost 3 years ago, I wrote on Slugger about how a very different experience of immigration affects working class people. (See here:   https://sluggerotoole.com/2023/11/27/it-is-different-for-working-class-communities/)

I have no problem with people discussing immigration and its impacts, positive and negative as outlined in that article. However, I have no sympathy with people claiming they do not have a voice. This excuse of not being listened to was used by Loyalist rioters during the shameful Holy Cross Primary School riots by people who had Nigel Dodd’s DUP as their MP. Today people are rioting on the Lower Newtownards Road and claiming that they are not being listened to. Their MP is Gavin Robinson – talk to him.

Wanting to talk about immigration is fine; becoming one of our black-shirt rioters and destroying unionist areas is not OK. I understand that these foolish young people are being manipulated, but if a few were lifted by the PSNI and held on remand until after the marching season we might get a peaceful marching season and they might learn a lesson.

On Tuesday, the wide dispersal, organisation, and simultaneous nature of the violence was striking. Yesterday saw further violence in Glengormley (twelve police officers inured) as the unrest made its way to suburbia, directing smoke signals towards the Chimney Corner hotel. The glorious tradition of recreational rioting from young, voiceless and disaffected males has all too easily segued into racist thuggery, underpinning a complex and exploitable situation.

The barbaric attack on Stephen Ogilvie in North Belfast on Monday night was unfathomable in its outright callousness and bloodlust, leaving Mr Ogilvie with life-changing injuries. A 30-year-old Sudanese man has been charged with attempted murder.

Norman Hamilton, the former Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland made the excellent – and uncomfortable – point on Evening Extra yesterday that:

“One of the elephants in the room [is that] we have not had an intelligent conversation about the relationship between immigration and integration: that simply hasn’t happened, it’s almost as if we daren’t mention it… the mutual benefit that can come to both communities…that’s a disgrace [that the proper societal conversation] hasn’t happened.”

Peaceful gatherings, demonstrations and protests about unvetted immigration have taken place in many towns. But the subsequent violence has inevitably “distracted” from the protesters’ message, much to chagrin of Paul Givan and other elected representatives.

On Tuesday evening, Ulster was saying, ‘No’: a lorry of some sort appeared to have been dumped across Molesworth Street in Cookstown. A car set on fire in Kilkeel. The burning police vehicle, too, in Portadown. A Turkish barbershop in Ballyclare, windows smashed. Far too many moments of note to keep up with. Though it was perhaps the properties burnt out on Lendrick Street in Belfast that gave us the most emotive images, with a family cowering for shelter in the back of a police Land Rover.

Some schools closed early yesterday, education disrupted, as rumours of more trouble left a vacuum of uncertainty.

If we were to believe that the Slurry in Scarva would be enough effluence for one week, then think again. The online overlords of the Great Grift will keep the discerning gentleman and woman on the righteous path.

On Tuesday, Steve Bannon (Donald Trump’s former strategist), on a livestream with MAGA evangelist Jack Posobiec, said:

“…with Nigel [Farage] and the guys, there’s sometimes not the focus [needed]. Tommy Robinson is trying to pull this together. Although an Englishman, Tommy Robinson is trying to unite Northern Ireland and the Republic, in some sort of combination here.”

You can view the full exchange from the Pit of Acheron below:

On Facebook, Rupert Lowe (the rebellious foil to Nigel Farage’s, erm, more mainstream brand of discriminatory politics) had commanded:

“Patriots – if you are protesting tonight, in Belfast or elsewhere… Stay Calm. Keep your heads. Do NOT attack the police.”

Read between the lines, there.

On Tuesday’s Newsnight, the British-American broadcaster Mehdi Hasan’s glorious character assassination of Elon Musk and his ill-intentioned playbook summed up the wider problem that exists in our online reality:

With hellish carnage playing out on the streets, the Northern Ireland subreddit was so overcome with events that moderators deemed it necessary to implement code ‘M’ – A Protest Megathread. This allowed for a useful streamlining of narrative, enabling horrified observers to keep pace with swift developments. Among the comments of misery, fear, shame and overriding depression, there was one moment of light relief when ‘Usual-Charity-6772’ revealed, “it looks like there’s been massive amounts of destruction in Antrim town but no word on the protests.”

Late last night the thread came to life again, with the Sky News chopper providing the absurd image of an entire garden fence being used by the rioters.

Our localised perspective is something we tend to take for granted, so it was surreal to see Belfast front and centre of several other livestream broadcasts on YouTube and beyond. Steve Lookner from ‘Agenda Free TV’ inhabits this space, and he is a respected and neutral online news observer. He will often stream coverage about moderately ‘big’ events unfolding in America, or certainly significant international crises. Steve went ‘Live’ on Tuesday night with his video entitled, ‘Belfast Protests & New U.S. Strikes on Iran’. The stream amassed over 596,000 views. For a bloke who usually sticks to U.S. centric information on events such as a school shooting in Texas or a tornado in Arkansas, it was utterly remarkable.

We had reason to go to A & E in The Royal a few weeks ago. A Nigerian doctor took care of a serious issue for us. It shouldn’t matter a damn if he was from Nigeria or Newry, but in the context of ‘this place’ these things have now become an observation on many a person’s internal monologue, and he was fantastic and warm and lovely; and even if he had been an auld ignorant hoor, then fair play to him and so what? I thought then, and even more so now: what way do others judge this man when he’s out walking to the corner shop in his faded trackies and runners, with no NHS lanyard to be seen? What do they see? Indeed, I asked myself uncomfortably, how would I consciously, or sub-consciously perceive him?

In Anna Burns’s novel ‘Milkman’, the narrator remarks – whilst caught in the minefield of Troubles era language and a divided society – that the use of “ ‘Us’ and ‘them’ was second nature. ” Our country’s new genie is out of the bottle now, unfortunately, with those who fear the ‘Other’ emboldened and unafraid.

Standing on a hilltop in Saul last Saturday afternoon, I looked down into the distance across Strangford Lough. Little islets, skiffs and a colourful harbour town were all hazy in the distance. As a Tyrone native still trying to find his Co. Down reference points, I thought, ‘Is that Killyleagh? Or perhaps Portaferry?’ Neither maybe, but I saw and felt the beauty in this place, this country, and it was a real and peaceful and welcoming presence. Across the field, on another hilltop, the gigantic statue of St. Patrick’s gazed through the smirr, barely visible, and lost in thought.

The 2026 World Cup kicks off today with the opening match between Mexico and South Africa. 

Yet, the buildup to the tournament feels remarkably subdued compared to previous years.

A significant factor is the heavily tarnished international reputation of the US under the current Trump administration. Without sliding entirely into Godwin’s Law, there is an uncomfortable “Berlin 1936 Olympics” vibe hanging over the event. A vast number of fans have been actively put off visiting the United States simply due to their intense dislike of the regime.

Politics is rarely far from modern sport, and Donald Trump has done little for international diplomacy by implementing strict border measures that have restricted certain teams and travelling fanbases from easily entering the country. Even the poor old referees are getting blocked.

The geography of the tournament presents its own challenges. Matches are spread across three vast nations – Canada, Mexico, and the United States, and scattered thinly over sixteen host cities. Lacking a single cultural epicentre, the competition feels heavily fragmented, completely missing that distinct, unified pulse that usually captures the global imagination.

Those fans who are brave enough to make the transcontinental journey can look forward to being price-gouged at every single turn. The media has been awash with horror stories of astronomical flight costs, sky-high hotel rates, and eye-watering ticket prices. Realistically, a travelling supporter wouldn’t see much change out of ten grand. They have estimated that for an Argentinian fan hoping to accompany their team go the whole way to the final, it would cost them $32,000.

With all this in mind, many football fans have made the perfectly rational decision to stay at home and watch the action from the comfort of their living room or down the local pub.

It is always a massive shame when geopolitics gets in the way of a beautiful sporting festival, but it feels entirely inevitable given the fractured state of the world today.

Whether all of these structural and political issues will fade cleanly into the background the moment the whistle blows remains to be seen.

Are you looking forward to this year’s competition despite everything?

Pope Leo XIV celebrated Mass at Barcelona’s iconic La Sagrada Família yesterday, delivering a papal blessing to the highest spire of what is now the tallest church in the world. The basilica’s distinctive Modernist structure has been under construction for more than 140 years. However, this past February, work finally concluded on the central Tower of Jesus Christ. Standing 566 feet tall, the spire is crowned with a monumental, five-story ceramic cross. The historic evening concluded with a magnificent drone display, which illuminated the sky with Antoni Gaudí’s face and his most famous quote.

“To do things right, first you need love, then technique.”

Yesterday was also the hundredth anniversary of Gaudí’s death. Famously the cathedral is still unfinished.

Blessed Are Those Who Plant Trees Under Whose Shade They Will Never Sit.

A man in his 40s was attacked on Kinnaird Avenue in north Belfast, sustaining serious injuries to his eyes, face and back. Much of the incident was captured on video and circulated widely on social media, though authorities and political leaders urged the public not to share the footage given its graphic nature.

A 30-year-old Sudanese man has been charged with attempted murder, possession of a bladed article in a public place, and making threats to kill. He is due to appear at Belfast Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday 10 June. Jon Boutcher stated on Radio Ulster this morning there is no information to suggest the attack was terrorism related.

Last night, anti-immigration protests broke out at a number of locations across Belfast, including the Newtownards Road in east Belfast, Clifton Street in north Belfast, and near the Royal Victoria Hospital. A Glider was set alight on the Newtownards Road, several cars were burned, and a building on the edge of the city centre caught fire, so that residents had to be evacuated.

Translink suspended all bus and rail services in and out of Belfast. Police helicopters patrolled overhead and many city centre shops closed early. Smaller protests also took place in Antrim, Southampton, Glasgow, Bangor and London.

The leaders of Northern Ireland’s five main political parties issued a joint statement condemning both the original attack and the subsequent disorder. First Minister Michelle O’Neill described the attack as “heinous” but warned against attempts to exploit it to target minority communities. Keir Starmer called the stabbing “sickening” but said there was “no tolerance” for street violence.

Please remember this is a fast-moving story and few the details have been verified. Readers are encouraged to follow updates from the official sources and established news outlets. As with any incident of this nature, misinformation has circulated rapidly on social media, and caution is advised before sharing unverified claims.