A biting rebuke of the terrorizing of immigrants in Belfast. ""Let me be very clear about who is doing this. The masked men are loyalists. They are British unionists. They wrap themselves in the Union Jack, the Butcher’s Apron as we call it in Ireland, and they claim to be defending their communities. Claire Hanna, the SDLP MP for Belfast, called it what it is: ‘a race-based pogrom… men going door to door asking to “get the foreigners out” based exclusively on the colour of their skin.’
"The violence is concentrated in poor Protestant areas where the banned paramilitary Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Volunteer Force are still strong, organisations with decades of experience in ethnic cleansing, tolerated by the British government for generations because they are politically convenient to have around. They know how to do this. They have done it before and now, they are doing it again.
"These are not Irish people. Simply by virtue of the fact they would never be heard calling themselves ‘Irish.’ They don’t want to be. They are British and this is despite the fact they don’t even live in Britain.
"And here is something the commentators discussing this ‘unprecedented’ violence seem to have entirely forgotten. This is the Shankill Road. This is the same stretch of streets where, in the 1970s, a loyalist gang known as the Shankill Butchers roamed at night abducting Catholics at random and murdering them with butcher’s knives, killing at least nineteen people in some of the most sadistic sectarian violence of the entire Troubles. Three of their victims were taken from streets within walking distance of where these riots are now unfolding. Where was the rolling news coverage then? Where was the talk of ‘shocking scenes never witnessed before in Belfast’? The violence was not new in 2026. It has simply changed the colour of its targets, and in doing so, finally become newsworthy to people who never cared before.
"Here is the sick irony. These loyalist thugs are targeting minority communities whilst asking the Irish nationalists to unite with them against anyone who isn’t white. But we Irish have a memory longer than theirs and we know that in one month, at their July bonfires, they will drape Irish flags on enormous pyres and scrawl ‘KAT’ on them. That is ‘Kill All Taigs’. ‘Taig’ being a slur for Irish Catholics. [The illustrations of this hatred are shocking.]
"They will celebrate the memory of pogroms that drove Catholic families out of Belfast in 1920, when loyalists expelled 10,000 Catholic workers from the shipyards and burned thousands more out of their homes. Sir James Craig, Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister, later told the assembled workers: ‘Do I approve of the action you boys have taken in the past? I say, yes.’
"That is the history these people are upholding. And now they want Irish nationalists to join them in some kind of bastard patriotism against ‘foreigners’? The same people who will burn my flag next month want me to stand beside them today?
the collaboration, and the imported problem.
"But there are traitors. The loyalist far-right and the Irish far-right are collaborating. Two factions whose ideologies are diametrically opposed, one British supremacist, one Irish supremacist, have found common ground on a shared belief in the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory. After centuries of mutual animosity, they are shaking hands over the bodies of brown people.
"Aris Roussinos, who has been living in Belfast, reports that the idea of Catholics and Protestants uniting against mass immigration is ‘overwhelmingly one pushed more by Loyalists than by Nationalists,’ but there have been ‘the first glimmerings of a tentative and distrustful rapprochement.’ This terrifies me. It should terrify everyone. Because the fascism that has plagued Britain since the 1930s, the organised, street-fighting, race-hate fascism, has always been kept at bay in Ireland by the simple fact that Irish nationalists lean left. We know who the enemy is. It is not the brown family down the road. It is the empire that has been trying to crush us for eight centuries. But if that left-wing tradition frays, if Irish nationalists start buying the same lies that have turned English workers against each other, then we are lost."
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