the North burns as racist thugs unleash a pogrom on minority communities.
masked loyalist gangs exploit alleged assault and lead terrifying attacks against migrant families in Ballymena.
Good day, spectators,
And we’re shifting the focus to my home nation, Ireland, today.
The past couple of nights, the streets of Ballymena, County Antrim, were alight with petrol bombs whilst migrant families were forced to barricade themselves in their attics, and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) admitted they barely prevented a ‘pogrom.’
Yet the script is scarily familiar. An alleged crime becomes the pretext for racist mobs to unleash a wave of violence. But this wasn't spontaneous outrage. It was orchestrated fascism, dressed in the language of ‘community concerns.’
The patterns are unmistakable and the script is well-rehearsed. What unfolded in Ballymena represents not merely civil disorder, but a calculated escalation in an emerging far-right project in the North of Ireland. And it’s one that exploits genuine community anxieties to advance a racist agenda that threatens to tear apart what remains of the peace process.
the timeline.
The violence followed a depressingly predictable sequence, each stage building toward the inevitable explosion of racist fury that followed.
The spark was two Romanian teenagers appearing in court over an alleged assault. Within hours, hundreds gather for what organisers term a ‘peaceful protest’ – a transparent cover for what comes next. I must mention at this point, that the speed of mobilisation reveals this was not a random, organic community response, but a coordinated operation waiting for the moment.
As darkness fell in the evening, masked loyalists with British flags broke off from the main demonstration, building barricades and launching systematic attacks on homes along Clonavon Terrace. This street chosen to be targeted because it houses migrant families.
Six homes were firebombed in what I can only call attempted murder. Families and children had to flee through smoke and flames as petrol bombs crashed through their windows and masked men bayed outside their doors a la Ku Klux Klan.
The violence, as always, spread beyond its intended victims. Police were ambushed so they retaliated with baton rounds and later, senior officers acknowledged that they felt the situation ‘could have become a massacre’.
All of this unfolds under the loving and watching eye of politicians like Jim Allister (Traditional Unionist Voice), who immediately and without so much as a hesitation, blamed immigration for the violence which is a dog whistle so shrill that it could shatter bulletproof glass. The message was clear: the violence was regrettable, but understandable. The real villains were the migrants themselves.
But this wasn’t a one-off. In fact, the steps leading here follow a now-familiar far-right formula…
from whispers to firebombs—the playbook.
Let’s be quite honest: this is how ethnic cleansing begins in so-called liberal democracies. It doesn’t start with jackboots and midnight raids, but with manufactured crises and weaponised respectability.
Step One: You’ll get politicians and far-right influencers systematically hyping isolated crimes as existential ‘cultural threats.’ Every single incident becomes evidence of invasion, every social problem proof of foreign contamination (not establishment rot and increasing wealth disparity for sure). The groundwork for these pogroms is laid through months of deliberate rhetoric, always stopping just short of explicit incitement:
Step Two: Protests are organised. Always framed as ‘peaceful’ and ‘legitimate,’ but always purposely designed to escalate. The respectable faces provide cover while the hardcore elements mask up and prepare for violence.
Step Three: Paramilitary-aligned thugs—many with well-documented UVF and UDA connections—weaponise the manufactured anger. The violence that follows is dismissed as regrettable but inevitable, the price of ignoring ‘genuine community concerns.’
Sound familiar? It should. Because this is basically the UK’s 2023 xenophobic riots rewritten for a unionist audience. The same tactics, the same lies, the same pathetic capitulation from authorities who treat far-right violence as a force of nature rather than a political strategy that can be defeated.
Note:
Whilst I firmly believe prevalent loyalists are the ones whipping up and leading this violence, and this did happen in a very loyalist ‘stronghold’, I can not pretend racism is confined to one community in Ireland. Irish nationalists have proven equally capable of anti-immigrant hatred which creates the bizarre spectacle of sworn enemies finding common cause in their shared bigotry. It’s much rarer but I guarantee you there were self-proclaimed Irish Republicans at these events. Fascism transcends sectarian boundaries when there are minorities to scapegoat.
the hypocrisy hierarchy.
The response from political and security establishment officials in the North reveals the deep moral bankruptcy at the heart of the state's approach to far-right violence.
The PSNI calls the violence ‘racist thuggery’ which is accurate enough like, but it falls short of naming the loyalist paramilitary networks that organised and directed it. This isn't incompetence though; it's simple and wilful deliberate blindness. Naming the UVF and UDA as terrorist organisations behind racist violence would require treating them as such, opening a pandora’s box and disrupting a carefully-maintained fiction about ‘former’ paramilitaries’ turned ‘community workers.’
At the same time, you have the DUP and TUV offering ritual condemnations of violence after spending months stoking the very tensions that made it inevitable.
Jim McAllister's endless rhetoric about ‘demographic change’ and ‘cultural replacement’ is simply Great Replacement Theory delivered in an Ulster accent. When the violence comes, he washes his hands with crocodile tears about ‘regrettable excesses.’ These people are the worst kinds of cowards, they want this to happen but they don’t want to be the ones doing it, and the mugs on the ground willingly oblige on their behalf.
The media, in its infinite and insufferable quest to be ‘neutral,’ continues the shameful practice of framing organised racist attacks as ‘community tensions.’ The suggestion here is that burning migrant families out of their homes represents some kind of legitimate political discourse. But this isn't neutrality at all, it's straight-up complicity in the pogrom. Every headline that treats fascist violence as understandable ‘frustration’ makes the next attack more likely.
Meanwhile, a Romanian family cowers in an attic as their home burns below them, abandoned by a state that treats their terror as the acceptable cost of keeping loyalist paramilitaries sweet. We are, as the kids would say, cooked.
the next fire.
I think, for me, the thing that upsets me the most about this whole fiasco is the lies behind this violence. As soon as you do the slightest bit of research, they collapse under the slightest scrutiny, but facts have never been the point of fascist organising.
Just 3.5% of the population in the North are ethnic minorities – a miniscule fraction. Since 2001, net migration has totalled just 62,000 people in a population of 1.9 million. This is demographic change that normal, functioning societies absorb without even so much as a blink.
But fascists don't like facts; they lead to cognitive dissonance that causes headaches in their feeble, wee brainlets. Fascists simply traffic in fear and you’d best believe this violence isn't about Romanian teenagers or migration statistics, it's about power.
Loyalist paramilitaries are exploiting manufactured crises to reassert control as their broader political project crumbles. With Stormont dysfunctional, Brexit exposing unionism's contradictions, and a ‘Catholic’ plurality looming, ethnic intimidation becomes the last tool to ‘defend Britishness.’
This is what is happening: Ballymena is a test run. The thugs, paramilitaries and their political enablers are gauging the state's response, testing the boundaries of acceptable violence. If the PSNI and Stormont keep treating organised racist attacks as mere ‘disorder’ rather than domestic terrorism, escalation is inevitable.
The next targets are already being selected: Belfast's Muslim community, Roma encampments, anti-racist protesters who dare stand in solidarity...Catholics…again. These people know weakness when they see it, and the state apparatus in the North of Ireland looks very weak indeed.
People will say I am overreacting or exaggerating but I am just recognising patterns. From Germany in the 1920s to Gujarat in 2002, we know how it ends when fascist organising isn’t crushed early. The comfortable assumption that ‘it can't happen here’ is precisely what allows it to happen everywhere. Wake up.
The flames consuming migrant homes in Ballymena aren't just destroying buildings, in my opinion, they're illuminating the moral choices that will define the North’s future. The only question is whether anyone in power has the courage to choose correctly while there's still time?
And on that note, I will let you go for today,
(And as always, thanks for reading, make sure to subscribe and do please give this post a ❤️ and restack below too.)
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