Analysis , | 07/03/2026 : Belfast Race Riots: How Loyalism Turned on Migrants

An acrid smell of burnt plastic had filled the air for miles around on the first evening of violence.

This smell lingered for days along a stretch of the Lower Newtownards Road in East Belfast and the nearby row of terraced houses on Lendrick Street where cars and houses had been torched. A Sky News helicopter had captured the moment that crowds of masked rioters – many of them teenagers – set fire to a bus before targeting houses in a violent bid to drive “foreigners” from the area.

Dozens of districts in the city and beyond were listed on AI-generated graphics which had pushed for the unrest online just hours before. Addresses of HMO (houses in multiple occupation) where migrants were thought to be living would circulate the following day, repeating a tactic used in the predominantly Ulster Protestant town of Ballymena last summer.

These calls to action had themselves been triggered by news reports the previous day, 9 June, along with graphic social media footage, of a violent knife attack in North Belfast. The alleged assailant was a Sudanese national who had entered Ireland’s northern jurisdiction through the Irish Republic.

For those who lived through the 30-year period of armed conflict in the northern part of Ireland now known as ‘the Troubles’, scenes of torched houses and masked vigilantes running checkpoints were grimly familiar. Although a newer far right play book was being employed here, the violence was undeniably lent force by a vestigial structure of organised loyalist violence which has blackened so much of Northern Ireland’s history.

When I returned to one Belfast flashpoint after the first night of unrest, news crew teams had already descended on the city, having apparently identified it as a case study in the rise of new far right street movements. 

But absent from a lot of their commentary and news packages were questions about Northern Ireland’s unique social and political contexts which informed these targeted race hate attacks.

Why Loyalist Areas, Not Nationalist Ones

One key and obvious fact about the explosive anti-immigration demonstrations was that they nearly all took place within loyalist areas, defined broadly as Protestant-dominated and Unionist ones where there are working-class households and significant pockets of deprivation.

The Irish Nationalist and Republican Falls Road district in West Belfast was named on one of the early AI graphics stirring up the violence, but no comparable actions materialised there. Another graphic called for northern Nationalists and Unionists, Catholics and Protestants, to unite in a supposed act of solidarity against ethnic minorities outside of Belfast City Hall (itself a symbol of unionism’s erstwhile political control in the region’s capital). Just three people are understood to have turned up for that demonstration.

Recreational rioting in the summer has long been commonplace in Northern Ireland. But, over the last two decades, the targets for such sectarian attacks have increasingly been redirected towards the territory’s small but growing ethnic minority communities. Recorded race hate crimes began to outstrip sectarian ones around a decade ago and the trend has only continued to grow since then.

The Democratic Unionist Party now looks a lot more like the old guard of political unionism, which was equally adept at riling up its voter base before retreating into big houses while the ensuing mayhem unfolded.

This, as many argued in June, was an old machine being repurposed for a new internal enemy, given its history of mounting pogrom-style attacks against Catholics in the North. The material contradictions within Ulster Unionism – the political force driving this contraption – are also relevant here. It has long been remarked that groups like the Orange Order and leading Unionist politicians would whip up prejudice as a means of diverting attention away from material inequalities in the areas they represent. Stoking such tensions remains a tactic these politicians rely on during moments of political pressure, including election cycles.

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), currently political Unionism’s hegemonic force, now looks a lot more like the old guard of political unionism, which was equally adept at riling up its voter base before retreating into big houses while the ensuing mayhem unfolded. Exacerbating such episodes of violence is the lack of an organic relationship the DUP and its rival Unionist parties share with the grassroots. This appeared to be on show again in June, with few if any political leaders attempting to de-escalate tension on the streets. 

Added to this pressure cooker was a degree of coordinated agitation that had been bubbling under the surface for some number of months. The flags of networked Christian fundamentalist groups had been appearing in loyalist areas alongside symbols and graffiti suggesting a growing connection with Britain’s far right street movement. Once the violence erupted in June, much of it cheered on from afar by high-profile agitator Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk – whose Space X company secured an IPO over the subsequent days, making him the world’s first ever trillionaire.

British far-right groups have long tried to ingratiate themselves with loyalist ones – not all of which are reactionary. As recently as the 2010s, figures like Paul Golding (then leader of Britain First, a neofascist political formation and hate group formed by members of the British National Party) tried and failed to both secure a presence and gain favour within loyalist circles. 

This time around, a range of networked far-right actors – from English social media influencers and Robinson’s associates, including the convicted killer Glen Kane – were spotted at flashpoints in and around Belfast. Kane was also seen among a small counter-protest contingent at a major anti-racism rally a number of days after the initial outbreak of violence. Their presence on the streets in June suggests a degree of fusion between groups that did not appear to sit together so easily a decade ago.

Towards the end of that same week, it emerged that the 44-year-old victim of the knife attack which had triggered the preceding days’ violence had himself been stripped, beaten and set on fire by the paramilitary gang Ulster Volunteer Force some two decades prior to June’s unrest. 

A Region With Almost No History of Migration

During the Troubles, there was (unsurprisingly) negligible inward migration to the region.

Over the intervening quarter century since the Troubles officially ended in 1998, there have been significant demographic changes. However, this remains the least culturally and ethnically diverse place not only across the UK and Ireland but in north western Europe in general.

Only 3.4 percent of Northern Ireland’s population – slightly over 65,000 people – were found to be from an ethnic minority background in the most recent (2022) census. In a jurisdiction of 1.9 million, just 2,379 are thought to be seeking asylum. 

Recorded race hate crimes having surpassed sectarian ones around a decade ago.

Yet June’s violence marks three consecutive summers of widespread and increasingly coordinated attacks of this nature. These episodes of racially-motivated violence seem to now be bedding in as a regular fixture of the summer.

Their implications go beyond periodic disruption and harms to target communities. As momentum builds behind long-running calls for a referendum on Irish unity, questions of how to manage the threat posed by these violent loyalist convulsions will become increasingly acute – not only for the staging of any border poll, but for the new state it could mandate. 

Marking this and other recent outbreaks of loyalist violence, as Oliver Eagleton recently laid out in a piece unpacking evangelical Ulster Protestants’ political culture, is a clear element of “lashing out” against a perceived loss of position and the privileges it conferred. Their broader coalition extends beyond this provincial religious-political subculture – with its striking parallels and ties to the US ‘Deep South’ – but statements in recent weeks, including a firebrand preacher having argued it was “hard to criticise” the rioters, underline the role this fundamentalist fervour plays in stirring up such hatred which, as Eagleton argues, has now “mutated” into more explicit white supremacism. 

Loyalist paramilitaries were spotted at a number of flashpoints, helping direct some of those taking part.

Unionism’s political leaders were once able to summon enough industrial labour might and paramilitary muscle to cripple the entire society and bring down regional governments, as it famously did in the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council Strike mobilisation against an earlier attempt at power-sharing through the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement. 

But, following decades of industrial decline, the purchase of more (rarely non-violent) demonstrations in recent years has been limited. They have increasingly relied on vulnerable younger people – some of whom were reportedly recruited in June to clear drug debts. 

Loyalist paramilitaries, who have long dragged their heels in response to calls for them to exit the scene, were spotted at a number of flashpoints, helping direct some of those taking part. Notably, the riots themselves took place in areas they control and it may partly have been about these groups flexing their muscles to show that, despite their influence waning and some of their most threatening murals currently being painted over, they won’t so easily be swept away.

Grassroots Networks Outpace the State

The violence inflicted serious harms on both the people who experienced it in some way and on areas where the charred remains of the collateral damage were visible for days after the unrest.

But it also revealed resilient grassroots networks of emergency response and mutual aid that sprung into action while the authorities’ early efforts to address the violence flagged. Perhaps most significantly of all, a number of grassroots organisations – the Anaka Women’s Collective and the PPR charity among them – managed to evacuate and re-house substantially greater numbers of people during those critical first evenings than the Northern Ireland Housing Executive and other state agencies combined.

As some observers in Belfast pointed out, inter-generational experience of comparable violence has produced networks of civil society support which may arguably be better-equipped to respond to such sudden outbreaks of violence than other places. With further riots and street violence a real prospect across the whole of the UK this summer, it is not clear whether equivalent groups in Britain would be as well-prepared for similar fallout there.

Few questions are being asked about how and why this has become a new annual fixture of summers in this place.

As the week’s violence extinguished, a number of anti-racism rallies across the region marked a certain turning point within this cycle. One demonstration outside Belfast City Hall mobilised thousands on the Saturday and seemed to draw an initial line under some of the worst disruption. But little seems to have been asked about what would happen next.

Some 200 cops – many of them from Scotland – were dispatched to Northern Ireland in an effort to minimise the damage for tourism operators and other businesses with political sway, as well as to contain any ongoing attacks within the loyalist districts where many of the flashpoints had emerged. This itself holds certain echoes of the Troubles – when whole swathes of the city were redesigned to contain largely sectarian violence within working-class areas, where around two-thirds of the casualties were recorded – and leafy suburban areas were less heavily marked nor transformed into ‘no-go zones’.

The political and media agendas have quickly moved on, even though this might not be the only outbreak of such violence. As rebuild efforts and work to relocate evacuees continue, few questions are being asked about how and why this has become a new annual fixture of summers in this place.