From Ballymena to Coolock – anti-immigrant protests in Ireland

In early June rioting broke out in Ballymena in the north of Ireland. Mark F writes about the racism which has always been part of loyalist political culture, now finding a parallel in anti-immigrant racism in the South.

On a train back from Belfast to Derry the other week, my father struck up a conversation with a couple who got on at Ballymena and had sat opposite him. They were originally from Slovakia and had been living in Ballymena for 16 years. Ballymena was now where they called home. That is, before racist rioting broke out there and they became targets. Their house had been attacked, their windows smashed and out of understandable fear they had fled the town. All because they were not considered ‘locals’.

The rioting started in Ballymena on 9 June and spread to other unionist-majority towns and areas in the following days. The rioters’ anger was due, they said, to the news of a sexual assault against a teenage girl. Those charged with the assault were teenage boys, understood to be Romanian as it was reported they required a Romanian translator. This detail was enough to spark the riots that followed, which were clearly directed at immigrants. Stickers of British flags soon started appearing on doors in Ballymena to indicate that the family inside the building were not to be touched. 

Any purported concern for the wellbeing of women and girls by the rioters is undermined by the fact that sexual assault, gender-based violence and femicide occur quite commonly in the north of Ireland without any ensuing rioting whatsoever. The difference seems to be that these crimes are usually perpetrated by white men. 

White men such as Jeffrey Donaldson, former leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), who is accused of 18 sexual offences, including rape. White men, such as Herbie Balmer, a paedophile convicted of raping two schoolgirls but who is in fact protected by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), a loyalist paramilitary group. The UDA seemed to have played a role in the riots, but Balmer isn’t even an isolated example of the group protecting sex offenders. 

These examples make obvious the fact that the riots were an excuse to purge ‘non-locals’ from unionist/loyalist areas. The targets of rioters’ attacks after all included women and children, like the Slovakian woman my father met on the train to Derry. 

Racism as constitutive of Ulster unionism/loyalism

Politically, socialists and Irish republicans insist on saying that the news from somewhere like Ballymena happened in the ‘north of Ireland’. By doing so they refuse to acknowledge the imperially enforced, ahistorical statelet that is ‘Northern Ireland’. Before its creation, Ireland had always been considered to be one country, even by unionists, and was administered as such by the British crown for centuries. 

However in the context of the riots, it perhaps does make sense to say that what happened, happened in ‘Northern Ireland’. Pogroms are as Norn’ Irish as Orange parades and ‘fifteens’. They were there when the state was founded – when riotous ethnic cleansing cleared swathes of Belfast of Catholic families from Protestant areas – and show no sign of going away over 100 years later.

Close watchers of the news from Northern Ireland will know it is often peppered with stories of black, Muslim, eastern European or Irish Catholic residents of a unionist/loyalist area being threatened to leave their home. The fact that this keeps happening in just one community is rarely spelt out by the media (an exception can be found in this BBC article from 2004), still less are the political dots joined up that would explain why this should be so.

The truth is that racism, sectarianism and the need to violently police and keep community areas ‘pure’ is structural to Ulster unionism and loyalism (loyalism being a proletarian variant of unionism, associated with paramilitarism). 

Northern Ireland was created to be a Protestant country for a Protestant people. As such, a central political problem for unionists is one of demographics. That is why, despite unionists’ penchant for calling themselves ‘Ulstermen’ and ‘Ulsterwomen’, three majority-Catholic counties in Ulster (Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan) were not included in Northern Ireland when the state was created. Too many Catholics, or too many ‘unloyal’ outsiders, is a direct threat to Protestant supremacy. 

Despite the best efforts of the Tory/Ulster unionist alliance that created the Northern Irish state, today ‘the taigs’ (a derogatory term for Irish Catholics) outnumber Protestants. Many of the institutions that sustained Protestant supremacy have either been broken up or have ceased to play a central role in Northern Irish affairs. Power is now shared constitutionally between unionists and nationalists, at least insofar as this applies to the devolved matters handed to Stormont by the British government. 

While Protestant supremacy has then been devastatingly weakened, it still has value as a psychological wage, with certain residual privileges still being insisted upon – the right to march through certain nationalist areas during the marching season, for example. The fact too remains that the union with Britain still holds. Northern Ireland remains ‘British’. And to be British is to be white, Protestant. All the more reason to use riot as a weapon to ensure it remains so, and to collect the full psychological wage of white Britishness. 

A non-sectarian, progressive form of unionism (‘labour unionism’, ‘liberal unionism’) may exist in the hearts and minds of the Protestant middle classes in the north, but it has failed to appear as a dominant political movement in the 20th or 21st centuries. It has only recently gained some arguable foothold with the rise of the centrist Alliance Party, who tend to present themselves as a non-sectarian voting choice and keep their soft support for the union quiet. Meanwhile, the ‘mainstream’ of Ulster unionism grows increasingly extreme, politically having more in common with the right of the US Republican party than even the more extreme flanks of Toryism today. (The DUP’s legitimation of anti-immigration rhetoric was undoubtedly an important contributor to the riots too.)

When even the leader of the supposedly loyalist-but-socialist party, the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), Russell Watton, uses the language of ‘illegals’ and ‘putting the needs of locals first’ with regards to social housing, it is easy to conclude that this political tradition will not alter its racist cast of mind. Its left flank, such as it is, is inevitably riven by contractions, as reactionary British imperialism is constitutive of its identity. 

There is no realistic path out of the endemic, violent racism that lies behind the thinking of unionist/loyalist communities in the North beyond the defeat of unionism and loyalism. This ideology leaves no space for a class-based politics that can move beyond an – at best – ethnically-based solidarity. It must be defeated by the breaking up of the union with Britain and the establishment of a united Ireland. 

False narrative of ‘both sides’ in the North, reactionary Irish nationalism in the South 

To be clear, racism is not an impossible quantity to find in nationalist communities in the North. There is an unthinking bigotry with regards to Irish travellers, for example. However, I have yet to see a story concerning the threatening or burning out of people due to the colour of their skin or their ethnicity in a nationalist area in the north of Ireland. 

To walk around the Falls or the Bogside you are as – in fact much more – likely to see a Palestinian flag than a memorial to the hunger strikers. Irish nationalism, and particularly the proletarian republicanism of the north, has tended to see itself and its experience of colonial oppression and discrimination reflected in the experience of other racial and ethnic groups internationally. Whether it is the black civil rights movement in the United States, the anti-Zionist resistance in the middle east, the Kurdish national struggle or the Tamil Tigers. Name a national movement of liberation and you will eventually come across some visible sign of support somewhere in a republican stronghold in the north. Republicans have even directly involved themselves in these struggles, such as the training of ANC guerillas and reconnaissance work against the Apartheid regime in South Africa. 

However, there has been some spurious ‘both sides’-ing of the race riots in the North in recent weeks and in previous years, which suggest some northern nationalist involvement. There is scant evidence for such a charge, as Daniel Holder director of independent human rights group Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ) has indicated when analysing recent racist riots over the last number of years. 

This false accusation confuses the recent surge of anti-immigration protest in the south of Ireland with the northern experience. Palestinian flags are certainly not difficult to find in the South and people still hold to an anti-colonial outlook there. However, the sharpness of these views has not been whetted by direct anti-colonial struggle in over a hundred years. Still less is there a recent experience of the deprivation of civil rights, nor do people in the South face the spectre of a reactionary double that they must live alongside. 

Instead the South now finds itself a rich, modern country where such concerns belong to the past. The southern middle-classes may support the Palestinians, but find their own experience reflected in that of their educated, monied, continental equivalents. They see themselves as Europeans and no longer among the wretched of the earth. 

However, the so-called Celtic Tiger, as a neoliberal means of enriching the Irish economy (essentially by keeping corporation tax and regulations as low as possible for international investment), ensured that its rewards were unequally distributed. The financial crash of the late 00s and the following debt crisis and drastic austerity measures enacted by the Dublin government further divided the south socially. The losers – whether members of the petty bourgeoisie or the working class – now search for answers to growing social and economic problems, mostly acutely with regards to housing, which in Dublin outmatches London in terms of its unaffordability. In response some have joined a resurgent left, but for many others an anti-capitalist explanation doesn’t appear to have cut through. Social anomie has taken root, compounded by the shock of Covid and some of the harshest lockdowns seen in the world. 

Ireland’s woes can’t be the fault of the British, who are long gone. However, the idea of a threat to Ireland coming from foreign invaders has a useful cultural resonance for the right. The far-right – including international figures, most absurdly those based in Britain – are encouraging Irish people to see immigrants as a ‘new plantation’. (The plantation being a 16th century colonial project of settlement imposed on Ireland by the British Crown, in an attempt to destroy the indigenous Gaelic culture, with colonists mostly made up of Scottish Presbyterians and English settlers.) The difference between a settler-colonial project that was coextensive with the ethnic cleansing of Irish people, and the kind of immigration that Irish people themselves have blamelessly engaged in for centuries, requires a heroic ignorance or at least indifference to Ireland’s past.

The case of ‘Coolock Says No’ is illustrative. Coolock is an area outside of Dublin where the Irish government planned to create a centre for asylum seekers. This led to anti-immigration protests and the formation of a group called ‘Coolock Says No’. 

The name echoes the phrase ‘Ulster Say No’ used by unionists in the North, a bizarre choice for a group of supposed Irish patriots. Perhaps to ensure this point didn’t go unnoticed, Coolock Says No travelled up to Belfast last year to join in with loyalists in an anti-immigrant demonstration during that summer’s racist violence. They marched with the Irish tricolour, mixed in with a sea of British and Northern Irish flags, a jarring mix for northern observers. At one point it was reported that one of their number, not knowing Belfast, led a contingent from the demonstration down Lower Ormeau, a republican area near the centre of the city. They were not given a warm welcome, with local residents physically confronting them and pushing them out of the area.

After their day out in Belfast, Coolock Says No sought refreshment and were given a warm welcome by leading members of the UDA, drinking with them in one of their bars. Irish reaction felt itself perfectly at home, no matter whose dried blood might be found on the walls.