Right Now in Northern Ireland, Mobs Are Hunting “Foreigners” in a City That Settlers Built

As masked mobs burn immigrants out of their homes in Belfast this week, here's how the descendants of settlers came to hunt “foreigners” in a land their own ancestors arrived in by ship and took.

For four nights, masked crowds have moved through Belfast house by house, kicking in doors and setting homes on fire because they believe immigrants live inside. The unrest follows a brutal stabbing on a north Belfast street, and it has already driven more than two dozen people from their homes in a single night, among them Ugandan care workers and a Ukrainian family. In the west of the city, rioters torched a house and graffitied “Local homes for local people” on the wall beside it. Neighbors say it was the third time mobs have forced out the Romani family who lived there, and the previous attack came only two months ago, recent enough that one window was still boarded up when the men returned this week. Firefighters had to carry a two-month-old baby to safety through the smoke. Businesses across the city are now closing early and entire neighborhoods of people are fleeing as far-right organizers are circulating lists of addresses to hit.

Vivian Panka, the Dutch actress and the first Black performer to play Regina George full-time in the hit musical Mean Girls, is currently in Belfast with her cast’s touring production. She posted a video on TikTok from behind closed blinds, saying she has not left her house because she is too scared to leave, “especially as a person of color.” The producers have cancelled the show’s entire run at the Grand Opera House. The history behind all this exposes the narrative the rioters are pushing. The people behind much of the violence are Protestant unionists, descended from the English and Scottish settlers who came to Ireland as outsiders four centuries ago.

What’s Happening in Belfast Right Now

The violence began on the night of June 8, when a man stabbed 44-year-old local Stephen Ogilvie on a north Belfast street. Ogilvie lost an eye and suffered deep wounds to his face and back. Police arrested a 30-year-old Sudanese asylum seeker named Hadi Alodid at the scene and charged him with attempted murder, though they have not treated the attack as terrorism. Ogilvie’s family begged the public not to weaponize his suffering, pointing out how much migrants contribute to the health service the family was relying on.

Their appeal made little difference. Graphic footage of the stabbing appeared online within the hour, and Tommy Robinson, a British far-right activist, boosted it to six million views before Elon Musk amplified it further, posting about British immigration more than a hundred times over the following days. By the next evening, hundreds of masked people, some of them children as young as ten, filled the streets. AI-generated lists of businesses and home addresses were circulated on Facebook and Telegram, telling shops when to close and providing rioters with addresses where migrants supposedly lived. A WIRED investigation traced much of the coordination to the Active Club movement, a fast-growing neo-Nazi network with roots in the United States, whose local Ulster Youth Club wing coached the masked youths on what to wear and how to avoid being identified on camera.

Ethnic minorities make up only 3.4 percent of Northern Ireland’s population, roughly 65,000 people in a place of 1.9 million, and only about 2,400 are seeking asylum. Police recorded more than 2,000 racist incidents in the last year, among the highest totals since record-keeping began. This is the third summer in a row that Northern Ireland has seen organized racist violence, with each wave larger than the one before.

A Long History of Racism in Northern Ireland

To understand why “foreigners out” rings so strangely in Belfast, it helps to go back to the early 1600s. After the English crown defeated the Gaelic Irish lords of Ulster, it confiscated their land and handed it to tens of thousands of Protestant settlers brought in from England and Scotland. This was the Plantation of Ulster, one of the most thorough colonization projects in the history of the British Isles, and it created a new population loyal to the crown and set against the Catholic Irish already living there.

The Protestant unionist community at the center of this week’s riots, with its Union Jacks and “British born and bred” slogans, descends directly from those planters who arrived to hold Irish land for Britain. The slogan “foreigners out” takes on a different meaning when it is coming from the descendants of settlers who first arrived on that land by ship.

Immigrants have lived in Northern Ireland for a century, and they have faced hostility for just as long. Muslims settled in Belfast as early as the 1920s, and by the mid-1970s thousands of Chinese and South Asian families had made homes across the region. One of the earliest recorded attacks happened in October 1936, when a crowd of about 150 people surrounded the Belfast home of an Indian trader named Mohammed Din after a rumor spread that he had a white woman inside. The police broke up the mob, but the authorities later charged Din, the victim, with disorderly conduct.

For decades, officials insisted that the region had no racism problem, partly because the immigrant population was small and partly because the long conflict between Catholics and Protestants, known as the Troubles, consumed all the attention. A local politician claimed in 1964 that people of color were more welcome in Northern Ireland than anywhere else. This assumption ran so deep that when Britain passed its racial discrimination laws in the 1960s and 1970s, it exempted Northern Ireland, on the grounds that the problem did not exist there. The region did not ban racial discrimination until 1998.

The Troubles ran from the late 1960s until 1998 and killed around 3,600 people. Protestant unionists, who wanted Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom, fought Catholic nationalists, who wanted it to join the Republic of Ireland. The violence split Belfast into hostile territories. In August 1969, Protestant loyalist crowds drove Catholic families from their homes on Bombay Street in west Belfast and burned the street to the ground. The authorities responded by putting up the first of the “peace lines,” walls up to forty feet high that still divide Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods today. Loyalist paramilitary groups, chiefly the UDA and UVF, came out of that fighting. They began as armed gangs determined to keep Catholics out of Protestant areas. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 ended the Troubles, but these factions did not disband. When migrants started moving into the cheapest housing, much of it along the “peace lines,” the gangs turned their intimidation on them and told the newcomers to get out, just as they had once told Catholics.

Recent Riots and the Global Far Right

Northern Ireland has experienced widespread violence twice already in the past two years. Last June, the County Antrim town of Ballymena erupted after locals accused two Romanian-speaking teenagers of sexually assaulting a girl, and by the end roughly two-thirds of the town’s Roma population had fled. The summer before that, anti-Muslim riots broke out across the region after a British-born teenager murdered three young girls in England and false rumors online cast him as a Muslim asylum seeker. In both cases, violent actors used a real crime as an excuse to attack people who played no part in it, targeting them for their race or religion.

The newer element in these recent violent episodes is the global interconnectedness of these hate groups—much of the hateful rhetoric these immigrants receive is coming from outside Northern Ireland. Neo-Nazi networks and billionaire accounts are promoting “remigration,” a call to expel migrants from Western countries. Many leading figures in American politics openly support this movement. The men torching buses on the Newtownards Road are mostly working-class locals who have real frustrations about housing and neglect, but the online discourse guiding them is coming from some of the most powerful people on the planet. Their grievances have real causes, and immigrants are not one of them. Pointing working-class anger at immigrants keeps it away from the policy failures and underinvestment that actually caused the housing shortage, and that is what makes this violence useful to the powerful figures fomenting it.

The rioters are spreading panic about an immigrant invasion, but the people they are targeting largely came to Northern Ireland to work in hospitals and care homes or to find somewhere safe to live. This week, those families spent their nights deciding whether the country still has room for them. Driving people out through violence has happened many times before in Northern Ireland. The only thing that has changed is who the country is trying to push out.