Northern Ireland’s police commander confirmed Thursday that 120 police reinforcements are coming from Scotland to help quell racist attacks on Muslims following four nights of violence mostly in Protestant unionist areas.
Chief Constable Jon Boutcher confirmed the move at Stormont Castle after meeting the leaders of Northern Ireland’s cross-community government. Flanking the top cop, First Minister Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin and Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly of the Democratic Unionists sought to project a common message of support for law and order and condemnation of the rioters.
But their show of unity was immediately undermined next door inside the Northern Ireland Assembly, where an emergency debate highlighted a gulf between most parties and the Democratic Unionists. Northern Ireland’s main pro-British party sought to amend the assembly’s anti-racism motion by inserting a clause defending the right to protest immigration.
Their amendment was rejected in a 28-43 vote — and irritated unionist moderates and Irish nationalists who had wanted to keep the focus on condemning the racist mobs, not making excuses for them.
Stormont’s latest division reflects the peculiar reality of immigration in a Northern Ireland that remains starkly divided along Catholic and Protestant lines, particularly in Belfast, where decades-old “peace line” barriers of concrete and steel separate neighboring communities into hostile sectarian camps.
When immigrant workers and asylum seekers seek housing in Belfast, they struggle to find anything available in faster-growing Catholic areas, where state housing lists are longer in already overcrowded communities.
They dwellings more readily on the more thinly populated Protestant divide of the divide – particularly in the most down-at-heel districts dominated by one of two “loyalist” gangs, the Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Volunteer Force. Their ranks include neo-Nazis and others committed to “white power” causes.
‘Counterproductive’
Police and politicians say members of both outlawed groups helped stoke the violence that started Saturday night with a march police blocked before it could reach its planned target, the Belfast Islamic Centre. Marchers instead fanned out to torch immigrant businesses, and to vandalize and break into immigrants’ homes. At least one immigrant remains hospitalized days after a gang stamped repeatedly on his head.
The wave of intimidation has left many Asian, Arab and African residents afraid to leave their homes or go to work, where they play a disproportionately large role in maintaining Northern Ireland’s health and care services.
Politicians from the center-ground Alliance Party, the moderate Ulster Unionists and the two Irish nationalist parties, Sinn Féin and the SDLP, took turns Thursday denouncing the rioters and insisting that Belfast must become more multicultural and open to foreign influences.
But the Democratic Unionist Party lawmakers stressed their view that such violence inevitably, if unfortunately, flows from too much immigration.
The rioting, said the DUP’s Jonathan Buckley, had been “counterproductive to the vital discussions we need to have about our country’s immigration policies.”
To groans from across the chamber, Buckley blamed “large-scale uncontrolled immigration over a long period of time” for placing “additional strain on public services such as housing, school places and council services.”
He added: “It is better for me to say it in this place than for people outside this place to express it in a violent way which is unacceptable.”
Least diverse nation in the U.K.
Others slammed the DUP’s message on a day when leaders of Northern Ireland’s minuscule Muslim community had been invited to sit in the visitors’ gallery. They noted that Northern Ireland remains the least diverse corner of the U.K. with a population that is more than 96 percent white.
Claire Sugden, a liberal unionist who sits as an independent, addressed a group of Muslim visitors in the gallery above.
“To those being targeted, I am so sorry that living here has made you feel scared, intimidated and unsafe. I’m ashamed,” she said.
Referring to the criminal rackets of the UDA and UVF, she chided hard-line unionists for trying “to justify the behavior” of militants who in turn encourage youths in unionist areas to threaten immigrants and clash with police. “It is your community they’re exploiting and your children they are manipulating.”
And Alliance’s Kate Nicholl, who came to Belfast at age 12 as a white refugee from Zimbabwe, grew emotional as she decried unionists willing to defend the “legitimate concerns” of gangs and rioters. She said it was “shameful” for them to blame the relatively small immigrant community for wider housing supply problems.
“We are here about racist crime, Islamophobia. We will have another conversation about housing. Please do not conflate them. It is negligent to do so. It’s dangerous to do so,” she said.
Boutcher, the police chief, sought to reassure Muslim leaders by bringing together imams from every mosque across Northern Ireland and pledging to identify and charge every rioter. He noted that 16 had already been arrested and 11 charged, while detailed scrutiny of police and closed-circuit video footage was now beginning.
But Boutcher — a veteran English police officer appointed to the Belfast post in October — said his force was severely understaffed and “exhausted,” with potentially more street clashes to manage this weekend on the fringe of Protestant parades.
“We cannot stand up and stand alone to deal with disorder like this anymore. We need support,” he said, confirming that Police Scotland had agreed to deploy four public order units with 120 officers to Belfast starting Tuesday.
Boutcher said immigrants “feel a fear of the like I have not seen in over 40 years of policing. … This has got to stop and we will stop it.”
