The riots and the UDA bosses

Enough time has passed since the race riots in the North of Ireland, starting 10 June, for some provisional conclusions to be drawn.

The attacks followed a knife attack on a man, Stephen Ogilvie, in North Belfast. A 30-year-old Sudanese national has been charged.

The following night, race riots began, spurred on by postings on social media. Homes and vehicles were burned out, with migrants being explicitly targeted in what are mostly loyalist areas of Belfast.

One Protestant pastor on the ground described families being put out of their homes “because they’re black”.

Patricia McKeown, Unison regional secretary, told the BBC that a nurse with “a different skin colour was chased into the Ulster Hospital by four masked men”.

Despite her experience, she “insisted on doing her shift.” McKeown added: “There is no excuse for any of this. This is racism, pure and simple.”

McKeown is right. It has since emerged that some of those targeted in what can only be described as pogroms lived at addresses which had previously circulated online.

Amongst those targeted are nurses, social workers and long-settled migrants who work in the NHS and other vital public services.

Following the worst rioting on Wednesday 10 June, the family of Stephen Ogilvie appealed for calm, saying they wanted to “make it absolutely clear that overnight unrest is not welcome, and peaceful protest is the only way forward”.

“We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector and we depend on them to make our country work.” They said they did not want this “terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility”.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said this time there was “no evidence” the disorder was coordinated by loyalist paramilitaries, pointing instead to social media. Ofcom too said some of the disorder “appears to have been incited online.”

This was echoed by loyalist activist Jamie Bryson who said “it’s not loyalist paramilitary organisations” behind this week’s disorder. “The leaderships of the organisations have been clear, they’re not taking any part in this, they’re not encouraging anybody to take any part in this.”

The authorities here are being coy, and Bryson is no neutral observer. Despite suggestions that paramilitary leaders were only “observers,” only an idiot could truly believe that disorder, organised or spontaneous, could happen in estates such as Rathcoole in Newtonabbey without the active involvement or at least the passive permission of the Ulster Defence Association.

Transition

The state, whose strategy is to encourage paramilitaries to “transition” away from violence through offering generous financial inducements in the form of grants and other funding, has every interest in playing down loyalist involvement.

Loyalist paramilitaries have every interest too in keeping the money taps flowing, while also positioning themselves as vital community gatekeepers, without whom “worse” unrest might occur.

TheSunday Life tabloid has been one of few outlets to dismiss this official narrative.

It reported that an arson attack on the car of a Nigerian healthcare worker was ordered by a South East Antrim UDA boss, who had been to the fore in the riots in Newtonabbey. This was the third racist attack on the victim, who said he was planning to flee Northern Ireland.

Loyalist sources told the paper that the UDA commander “hates immigrants even more than Catholics. He’s a racist and sectarian thug who has been saying openly that he isn’t going to stop until every immigrant leaves Rathcoole,” explained one local.

The gang was told not to attack the police during the riots due to its involvement in lucrative transition talks — the UDA in South East Antrim has been promised a share of the government’s £2.9m PEACEworks scheme to help members make a “positive civic contribution”. Nigerian healthcare workers were, apparently, fair game.

Incidentally, while there is money for the UDA, civil society organisations in the North are seeing brutal cuts. EU funding was replaced by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, which was replaced from 1 April this year by the Local Growth Fund. The latter favours capital funding to revenue funding, meaning day-to-day funding available to community groups in the North drop from £25m per year to just over £9m. This includes a 64% cut to community-led employment support programmes.

It is these very same organisations who were to the fore in the aftermath of the riots, providing food, shelter and other support to those affected.

Clearly the riots are not reducible to loyalist paramilitary involvement but the official attempt to establish a stringent firewall between the pogroms and loyalism are risible.

A similar sectarian hatred to that which drove the murder of innocent Catholics during the Troubles is translatable into far-right racist terms with few modifications.

Loyalism combines a sort of majoritarian anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry and supremacism in the context of the North, mixed with the insecure defensiveness of a settler-community identity on the wider island. Even though the North is 97% white, migrants have become a target for a sense of insecurity and loss in sections of the loyalist community.

Economic conditions

It is not, however, a simple reflex of economic conditions or simply “understandable” in terms of poverty. Bryson, on BBC Radio, claimed rioting was mostly in loyalist areas due to disenfranchisement of young men, and argued “there is not the same disenfranchisement on the nationalist side”.

In strictly economic terms, there are 35% more unemployed young men (16-24) from a Catholic background than Protestant.

Neither are the riots, from the point of view of loyalist paramilitaries anyway, about genuine feelings for the victim of the initial attack. It has since emerged that Stephen Ogilvie was the victim of a UVF-linked drug gang in Scotland in the early 2000s, who beat, bullied and tortured him with cigarettes.

Opposing Violence

And of course, it has nothing to do with opposing violence against women and girls — as the complete lack of protests against the murder of Natalie McNally by an ex-partner or, indeed, in the wake of former DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson being found guilty of 18 counts of sex abuse, including one count of rape, against two young girls.

In identity or ideological terms, however, it is clear that Unionist leaders and loyalist groups have spent the last half a decade railing against the “Irish Sea Border” amidst demographic shifts which have seen Unionists pushed into a minority, including in Belfast.

As the North — slowly — becomes more diverse, migrants are a visible symbol of change, which loyalist ideology is conditioned to understand in violently negative terms.

On the positive side of the equation, Saturday 13 June saw Belfast’s largest ever anti-racist demonstration, involving unions and political parties, with similar demonstrations in Derry.

Aside from demonstrations, it will be crucial to sustain those networks which provided on-the-ground solidarity during the riots, combined with working-class assertion for greater funding for services and social provision.

As well as this, racist ideas must be confronted wherever they arise in communities across the North.