Homes torched. Cars set ablaze. Racist roadblocks. Bricks crashing through windows. Wheelie bins hurled onto the streets in flames. Gangs of masked men roaming neighbourhoods. Families fleeing their homes in police vans.
[Originally published at communism.ie]
On Tuesday night, Belfast was gripped by what has been described as the worst night of violence the city has seen in over a decade, as loyalist paramilitaries and far-right agitators exploited a horrific knife attack to whip up a pogrom against immigrants. By morning, entire streets resembled a war zone.
The rioters left little doubts as to their intentions. “Yeah, fuck all foreigners” shouted one man as he entered a house that had just been set on fire. Others laughed as they smashed cars and torched homes. Onlookers casually remarked “there’s wee girls inside” as masked men stormed a house to ‘liberate’ it from foreigners.
Unfortunately, such horrific scenes can no longer be regarded as isolated incidents. Racist riots and pogroms have now become a yearly occurrence in the North of Ireland. From the South Belfast riots of 2024 to last year’s disturbances in Ballymena, the pattern has become all too familiar.
Controlled by loyalist paramilitaries, and egged on by reactionary unionist politicians and far-right agitators the world over, these calls for violence have found fertile ground among certain backwards layers in disaffected Protestant neighbourhoods.
The British ruling class and media in particular have played the most despicable role in whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment for their own opportunistic reasons – even linking it to the question of the so-called ‘backdoor border’ (that is, the Common Travel Area) between the South of Ireland and the Six Counties.
It is the direct consequences of their poisonous rhetoric – and criminal policies – that were on full display on Tuesday. They are playing a very dangerous game. Their actions threaten to drag the North further down into a sectarian, racist and barbaric nightmare.
The choice posed in front of the North is increasingly clear: socialism or barbarism.
🚨 WATCH: A house is set on fire in Belfast after a Sudanese migrant was charged over the attempted beheading of a man pic.twitter.com/6GeZ5qMQoo
— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) June 9, 2026
Pogroms and paramilitaries
Gatherings of masked men began to assemble across loyalist areas from around 7pm on Tuesday.
By 8pm, a Glider bus was burning in East Belfast. Roadblocks to check the ethnicity of drivers were set up at some junctions. Homes, vehicles and businesses were attacked on Lendrick Street, Newtownards Road, Donegall Road, McMaster Street and Oakley Street, as well as in several other parts of the city. And to be sure, the violence was not confined to Belfast alone.
In Cloughfern, a group of around 200 masked men and youths broke away in formation from the main protest to the rallying cry of “LET’S FUCKING GO” before torching cars and attacking homes. A PSNI car was burned in Portadown. Across the North, houses were bricked, windows smashed and families terrorised. Social media quickly filled with videos showing masked gangs moving through residential streets, going door-to-door in search of targets. There are even reports of houses set alight in the small village of Dundonald.
By the end of the night, the Fire Service had to respond to 256 emergency calls. At least 27 people have been made homeless, others forced to flee for fear of being next.
While the horrific knife attack provoked an immediate sense of widespread revulsion, it would be a mistake to imagine there’s anything spontaneous about the scale of the systematic violence that unfolded during the night.
Anti-immigration demonstrations have become increasingly common across Britain and Ireland. Yet only in the North do they lead to such brutal, targeted pogroms. The reason? The directing role played by the loyalist paramilitaries – the masked, armed men that lurked in the background of all the key events that took place on Tuesday.
Indeed, despite the knife attack taking place in a majority Catholic area, the violence erupted in working-class Protestant areas where paramilitaries still hold considerable sway.
Eyewitness accounts describe groups of masked youths targeting the homes of non-white families while older masked men directed operations, identified targets, confiscated the phones of anyone recording and issued instructions. The imprint of organised paramilitary involvement could be seen throughout the night’s events – in the coordinated protests called across a number of locations, in the strict tactics employed to avoid arrests, and in the cold and carefully targeted attacks against individual migrant homes rather than the PSNI (who, incidentally, for the most part left the rioters totally alone).
As a piece in the Financial Times noted, loyalist paramilitaries have recently added to their vicious anti-Catholic sectarianism more “traditional far-right targets”. Combined with their ‘experience’ in carrying out pogroms, whipping up riots and disorder, and their semi-military discipline – it means they can exploit opportunities like the knife attack to further their own agenda.
Hypocrites call for calm
Within hours of the knife attack, the international far right had descended on the story like vultures.
Tommy Robinson shared footage and promoted protests. Elon Musk retweeted Robinson’s post and shared a message from Restore Britain declaring: “Do not make peace with evil. Destroy it” – a statement that can only be read as an incitement to a pogrom. Nigel Farage immediately jumped on the opportunist bandwagon, calling on authorities to disclose the suspect’s immigration status.
But responsibility does not rest solely with these right-wing demagogues.
For years, the British political establishment and media have banged on about immigration as a crisis, a burden and a threat. Every social problem capitalism is responsible for – from housing shortages and overstretched public services to low wages and economic insecurity – is blamed on migrants.
In government, the smiley, liberal and ‘moderate’ Keir Starmer has implemented racist migration policies virtually indistinguishable from those argued for by Reform UK. At the same time, the austerity imposed by successive governments has hollowed out working-class communities across Britain and the North of Ireland. It is precisely this social decay that creates the conditions in which right-wing demagogues can gain a hearing.
For its part, the British media – which has spent years pumping out anti-immigrant and anti-asylum-seeker crap – latched immediately on the Belfast knife attack. Some are even playing with the question of the border!
The Daily Mail ran headlines such as:
“Aboard the ‘migrant pipeline’ bus that ferries asylum seekers from Dublin to Belfast… and into Britain by the back door – as it’s revealed Sudanese ‘knife attacker’ took same route”.
The Sun doubled down with:
“UNCHECKED LOOPHOLE: Sudanese ‘knifeman’ exploited controversial ‘backdoor’ route into UK with NO immigration checks”.
Do these ladies and gentlemen understand the implication of the sensationalist headlines they run in order to sell a few more papers in Britain?
This so-called ‘backdoor’ is the border between the South and the North of Ireland. How do they propose to close it? Just a few years ago it was precisely the question of the border – in the aftermath of the Brexit negotiations – that provoked some of the worst riots Belfast had seen for quite some time.
British media and British politicians churn out this poison to sell papers or to achieve their narrow political aims. The implications it will have in the North of Ireland is not even an afterthought for them.
But when such rhetoric meets the sectarian monster that British imperialism has nurtured in the North for generations – and the deep social, economic and political crisis that is ravaging working-class communities – the result is explosive. It is like fuel meeting oxygen, to which the attempted beheading in North Belfast merely added a spark. Racist riots and pogroms are the inevitable outcome.
To this must be added the cynical manoeuvring of the TUV and the DUP ahead of next year’s Stormont elections.
The TUV has significantly eaten into DUP support since the latter agreed to restore power-sharing in 2024. They have achieved this by positioning themselves even further to the right on questions of sectarianism, immigration and culture wars. Significantly, it was the only major party not to join calls for calm on Tuesday afternoon.
The DUP on the other hand, fearful their lunch is getting eaten by Jim Allister and co., has shifted further to the right, and turned its reactionary rhetoric up a notch. One of their MPs, Carla Lockhart, stood shoulder to shoulder with some of those same masked men that terrorised Belfast just a few days earlier when she joined them to harass a Palestine solidarity march in Scarva.
And then these hypocrites join calls for calm and proclaim condemnations of violence. They are just as, if not more responsible than the thugs that were setting houses on fire.
Socialism or barbarism
On Wednesday, the violence continued. In one incident, a non-white healthcare worker was chased into a hospital by violent youths. A hit list of homes, allegedly of immigrants, circulated on social media, a chilling indication of the atmosphere that has been unleashed, and proof, were it needed, that there are organised paramilitaries sitting at the heart of this violence and inciting it.
On Wednesday night, however, the mob seemed to have turned more attention towards the PSNI, who suffered more injuries. This suggests that, whereas Tuesday was a coordinated pogrom, Wednesday was more uncontrolled. In all likelihood, the kids whipped up and incited by the older paramilitary men decided they’d had a good laugh on Tuesday and continued the rioting for a further night.
Even once the streets fall quiet, the underlying conditions that produced this violence will remain. As in previous years, they will erupt again in the future. After all, we are only just entering so-called ‘marching season’, which is consistently marked by sectarian tensions, increased racism and rioting.
The point is that as the crisis of capitalism intensifies and working-class conditions deteriorate, the forces of reaction are gathering strength, especially among disenfranchised Protestant layers.
Again, this is the third year running of racist riots and pogroms occurring in the North, and such reactionary riots have only gained strength every year since the riots over the NI Protocol in 2021.
There is no sweetening the pill. The first duty of Marxists must be to tell the truth. The imperialists have tied the Six Counties up in a web of deeply entrenched reaction. There is no easy solution to untangle it.
Behind these developments lies the never-ending crisis of British imperialism and the short-sightedness of the British ruling class, which are throwing fuel onto the flames of discontent among working-class communities. It is precisely this discontent that can get distorted beyond recognition by opportunist politicians and paramilitary leaders and channelled along reactionary, sectarian and racist lines.
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That means that, in the coming period, as British imperialism continues its downward spiral, it will get worse. The prospect of a Farage government in particular, with all its implications for the question of the Border and its anti-immigration rhetoric, has the potential to escalate the situation further.
This all poses a most serious threat to the working class. Nobody except the tiniest minority wants to see a return to the sectarian violence of the 1970s and 80s. But if the present conditions are left unchecked, violence will continue to spiral and a return to the levels of those days cannot be ruled out. The consequences for workers and youth all across the North would be nothing short of catastrophic.
The tragedy of it all is that the trade unions could provide a way out of the sectarian impasse. In 2021, bus drivers responded to an attack on a bus by staging a protest that garnered support from thousands. When in 2024 the Tories withheld pay rises for public sector workers, more than 150,000 workers from all communities came out on strike in a remarkable show of strength that sent shivers down the spines of the ruling class.
But unfortunately, rather than providing a leadership to the working class, those bureaucrats at the top of the unions abdicate any responsibility, releasing statements full of platitudes and appealing to the goodwill of the bosses in keeping workers safe.
The destruction and violence on show on Tuesday will have appalled the majority all across Belfast. The family of the victim of the knife attack has called for calm, as has the man who heroically intervened to stop it.
On Wednesday an uneasy atmosphere reigned over the city, as parents rushed to get their kids from school at 11am, in fear of a new wave of violence erupting. Yet, even amid the worst moments of the violence, you saw elements of solidarity in working-class communities – helping out families made homeless, healthcare workers offering their uniforms to migrants, checking in on streets and houses, and native-born families opening their doors to migrant families at risk of attack.
The majority don’t want to have anything to do with such appalling violence. They only want the right to live a decent existence – an affordable house, secure employment, well-funded public services, and safety in the streets. Whatever their views on immigration, after this week people will look around and find it’s their working-class areas that are left smouldering after the riots. Far from communities having been made safer, paramilitary gangsters will feel more secure in asserting themselves there.
The reality is that only socialism can provide a way out of the nightmare workers and youth live daily in the North of Ireland. The alternative is a further descent into barbarism.
