Two days of anti-immigration violence in Northern Ireland is nothing short of racist thuggery, Britain’s minister for the province said on Thursday, after police deployed water cannon and plastic bullets to tackle rioters for a second night.
Hilary Benn said there was less disorder on the streets of Belfast on Wednesday night as opposed to Tuesday, when rioters targeted ethnic minorities and foreign residents by torching homes and vehicles following a knife attack for which a Sudanese man has been charged with attempted murder.
But many of those who did clash with police on Wednesday were seeking to get to a hotel outside Belfast that has been targeted in the past for housing asylum seekers. Police said they used water cannon and plastic bullets, or baton rounds, on the street.
Asked on Sky News if violent scenes were racist riots rather than protests, he said: “Well, if you are targeting people on the basis of the colour of their skin, how else can you describe them? That is racist thuggery.”
ONLINE TOXICITY ‘NEEDS TO STOP’
Police and politicians say much of the violence had been encouraged and coordinated online.
“What we have seen is significant coordination from online social media activity. Some from people within Northern Ireland and some from … outside the island of Ireland,” Assistant Chief Constable Ryan Henderson told reporters.
“That toxicity is what’s bringing people out onto the streets. It needs to stop,” he said, adding that there may be prosecutions related to social media posts.
The original knife attack in Belfast on Monday night, which is currently not being treated as terrorism, comes at a time of heightened tensions in Britain over crime and immigration, with populist parties saying Britain’s asylum policy had allowed dangerous men into the country.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk has reposted many messages on his X platform denouncing the state of the United Kingdom following the Belfast incident, including reposting the leader of Britain’s Restore political party, which wants to deport hundreds of thousands of people from Britain.
‘COMMUNITY DEFENDERS’
There are also local factors at play and the unrest has brought back memories of the “Troubles”, three decades of violence between mainly Catholic Irish nationalists and predominantly Protestant pro-British “loyalists”.
“You have a fundamental problem in Northern Irish society in which we have a glorification of past violence,” said Professor Peter Shirlow, Director of the institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool.
Young men “wish to replicate the actions of their fathers in terms of appointing themselves as community defenders,” he said.
Most of the trouble has been in loyalist areas, but there are voices for and against the violence on both sides of the sectarian divide, Shirlow said. A majority across the region say immigrants do not make a contribution, according to a regular University of Liverpool survey.
Northern Ireland has now been gripped by anti-immigration violence for three summers in a row. Over the last two nights rioters have burnt houses, smashed windows, hurled bricks at police and marched down streets saying they were there to get “foreigners out”.
In recent days lists have circulated showing where asylum seekers were living, the addresses of immigration businesses were published and a nursing union official said ethnic minority nurses had been chased by masked men as they tried to get to work.
Police on Thursday said they were patrolling the addresses and hospitals to reassure workers.
(Reporting by Amanda Ferguson）
