A summer of discontent over immigration policies was marked by violent protests across Great Britain in August. Parallel protests were organized by right-wing and loyalist agitators in Northern Ireland, and they also descended into violence. Church leaders called on Christians to distance themselves from the violence and racist and anti-immigrant sentiment, and strong opposition to the protests quickly emerged, both to the initial march held by anti-immigration activists on Aug. 3 and follow-up protests the next week.
The protests were sparked initially by a deadly attack on children in England in July that had erroneously been blamed on an immigrant, but they quickly became an expression of widespread grievances among some native-born Irish and British citizens. The protests in Belfast and nearby towns explicitly targeted immigrant communities.
The initial march was planned to begin outside the city’s Islamic center, but with that path blocked by police, organizers sought out immigrant-run businesses and in the end destroyed two establishments on Belfast’s Donegall Road. Cars were set on fire, and a business on the ground floor of one apartment block was burned out by protesters.
Over the following days, there were more attacks on police vehicles and on businesses owned by immigrants, including at least one serious assault. But when right-wing figures on social media planned another anti-immigrant demonstration for Aug. 9, a counterprotest dedicated to opposing racism was thrown together that dwarfed the anti-immigrant demonstration.
One of the most troubling details of the social disorder in Northern Ireland was the counterintuitive allegiances that emerged. Loyalist paramilitaries seem to have played a central role in organizing the unrest in Belfast, but it was a surprise on both sides of the northern Irish border when they were joined by self-proclaimed “Irish patriots” from the Republic of Ireland.
Masked men waving the Union flag shouted racist slurs in tandem with another group of masked men waving the Irish tricolor. For those who lived through the decades of the Troubles, when republican and loyalist paramilitary groups waged a low-level but highly destructive civil war, the sight of these figures marching together added a further chilling dimension to what were already unsettling images of xenophobic and racist protests.
It is important to clarify that the “Irish patriots” who marched in Belfast are not in any way aligned with the Irish Republican Army or any of the organizations that traditionally made up the militant side of Irish nationalism. In fact, representatives from the contemporary counterparts of those nationalist movements were part of the counterprotests. The republic’s “patriots” are, in fact, representative of a far-right campaign that coalesced around opposition to the development of housing facilities for asylum seekers in a part of northern Dublin.
Northern Ireland, where 97 percent of the people describe their ethnicity as “white,” has a population of 1.88 million. It has not been a region that welcomes many immigrants. Emigration has been by far the more definitive historic experience.
Recent census figures report that only 6 percent of the population of Northern Ireland was born outside of the United Kingdom or Ireland. That is half the rate of foreign-born found in the Republic of Ireland, also better known as a source of emigration, not a destination for immigrants.
While there are now more immigrants arriving than emigrants leaving, the numbers of immigrants in Northern Ireland remain small—a net gain of less than 3,000 in 2022. The number of asylum seekers living in the region has been growing, but only 2.6 percent of those who are seeking asylum in the United Kingdom expect to live in Northern Ireland.
But the August protests did not come out of nowhere. Anti-Muslim racists skirmished with police in Belfast earlier in the summer, and reports of race-based hate crimes in Northern Ireland are at an all-time high. Meanwhile, the government in Dublin has heightened its own border security measures after concerns were raised in the spring that migrant people were using Northern Ireland as a point of entry into the republic.
A racial hierarchy
Siobhán Garrigan is not entirely surprised that people who present themselves as “Irish patriots” would end up allying with Ulster loyalists on the issue of immigration. Ms. Garrigan is the Loyola Professor of Catholic Theology at Trinity College in Dublin.
In her theological work, Dr. Garrigan has assessed the Northern Irish peace process. In an influential essay published over 10 years ago, she argued that the traditional account of Catholic-versus-Protestant sectarianism in Ireland obscured how the communities were ordered in a sort of racial dynamics, whereby the Protestant community was put to use to sustain the status quo of British rule.
In her analysis, “the logic of whiteness determines that societies organize themselves according to a racialized hierarchy.” Immigrant communities in Northern Ireland that do not fit in the binaries of Catholic and Protestant, nationalist and loyalist, nonetheless fit in the wider template of a top-down power structure.
In Northern Ireland today, Dr. Garrigan said, “what you have is a racial hierarchy that is a continuum. The very real tensions between the [nationalist and loyalist] communities continue to exist, but for the rioters they can also be put aside as they assert their superiority in the face of the ‘racial inferior.’”
One way to think about this is that the two settled communities—albeit with the loyalist side preeminent—found their identity in battling with each other for power, influence and resources. The arrival of immigrant communities that cannot fit in this settled arrangement provokes a racial and sectarian anxiety: Now the size of their community’s “slice” is threatened. For Dr. Garrigan, the anti-immigrant protests expose how “on some deep level, the [loyalist and nationalist] protestors know that they have way more in common than what divides them, even though their identity is based so much on that division.”
She views the counterprotests as a sign of hope. The people “came out in force,” she said, suggesting that the voices of fear will not have the last word in Northern Ireland. The community groups, which include churches, “are not just standing with immigrants in their words. They showed up in the counterprotest, and they showed up the next morning for the clean-up. That shows real solidarity.”
Jesuit support for migrants
Brendan Mac Partlin is an Irish Jesuit who has lived in Northern Ireland since 2009. He established the Migrant Support Service in Portadown, about 25 miles southwest of Belfast.
Portadown suffers from high levels of social deprivation and is infamous because of a historic standoff between the Orange Order, a sectarian Protestant organization, and residents in a Catholic area known as the Garvaghy Road in 1998. By the time Father Mac Partlin reached Portadown, the strong tensions between nationalist and loyalist communities had subsided, but he quickly recognized that the growing number of migrants in the area needed particular support.
The approach he took mirrors what Pope Francis has advocated. “I think Pope Francis’ description is dead good for what it’s about,” he said. “It’s about welcome and protect, promote and integrate.”
The Migrant Support Service is a means by which to “help migrants to settle in,” he said. The service offers English-language classes, but it also guides new immigrants through the practical demands of everyday life in Northern Ireland, helping people open a bank account, register with a local medical clinic, find a place to live and land a job among them.
“They’re all simple enough things,” but for all that still necessary, Father Mac Partlin said, because nothing is really simple when you are a newly arrived person in a different culture.
According to Father Mac Partlin, the present difficulties are in part a consequence of how the Good Friday Agreement—which brought an end to the Troubles—framed relations between different Northern Irish communities. The political structure of Northern Ireland resembled South Africa’s apartheid system to some extent, he said.
“I don’t think the Northern Irish government was good on integration at all,” he said. He argues that “the British approach of multiculturalism and approval of diversity and difference with no stress at all on integration means that people become isolated in their ethnic groups.”
For meaningful integration to happen, he argues, there needs to be community connection, economic development and receptivity from the host society: “Integration is about participation.” The Migrant Support Service seeks to make that possible in a society that has lacked a rich tradition of crossing cultural boundaries.
Father Mac Partlin holds out hope for Northern Ireland. Like Dr. Garrigan, he was especially encouraged by the strong showing of counterprotesters. “Their message is: ‘We are not going to have hatred and racism and we’re pro-diversity, equity and inclusion.’”
But he cautions that there may yet be difficult days ahead, noting the Northern Irish government’s decision to call for assistance from Scottish riot police during the recent troubles in Belfast. “That would indicate that [over] the longer term, they’re expecting more trouble,” he said.
Dr. Garrigan suggests that theologians, church leaders and Northern Ireland’s Christians have a part to play in this tense moment. “In the long term,” she said, “we need better theologies that unpack the mistake of racial hierarchies.”
She argues that the “pattern of thinking” between what we might call old-fashioned sectarianism and the contemporary unabashed bigotry “is the same.” And this presses Christians to ask, “Who does it serve?” She likens sectarianism in Northern Ireland to a cancerous tumor that is now metastasizing in a troubling but not unexpected fashion.
The God that Christians worship is the one who makes himself known in fearless hospitality. “Ultimately,” Dr. Garrigan said, the anti-immigrant protests “do not represent that God.”
Correction (Aug. 29): Since the original publication of this article, a sentence was altered to clarify its meaning and a courtesy title used to identify a source was updated.
