Families from Romania, Ukraine, Poland, Sudan, Ethiopia, China, Syria, Uganda and Nigeria fled their homes in Belfast on 9 June after crowds set fire to vehicles and properties, threw bricks through windows, pushed fireworks through letterboxes and broke down doors in what anti-racism campaigners described as a coordinated pogrom targeting minority ethnic communities.
The violence erupted 2 months ago after a knife attack on Kinnaird Avenue on Monday 8 June. By dawn on Tuesday 9 June, footage of the assault was circulating on social media platforms. Police had a suspect in custody — initially identified as a refugee from Somalia and later corrected to Sudan — but outrage spread anyway. Commentators focused on the assailant being black and the victim white, and messages quickly circulated questioning whether foreign men of "military age" in Northern Ireland had been "vetted" and what "alien culture" they had imported.
By 9.30am, a message was being widely shared telling people: "All business to close at 5.30pm tonight. No excuses." It listed 25 locations around Northern Ireland for people to gather at 7pm and said: "Please forward [to] all men of the age of 18 and over. Wear dark clothing … and be prepared to fight or be arrested." The Guardian said: "It was an invitation to a pogrom." Far-right agitators, including Elon Musk and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, known by his alias Tommy Robinson, amplified calls to protest.
A Pattern of Orchestrated Violence
The unrest spread through the day and into the evening. By early afternoon, schools were sending children home, public transport was halting and steel shutters were coming down over foreign-owned barber shops, supermarkets and other businesses. At about 7.30pm on the Shankill Road, a woman with a megaphone recited the Lord's Prayer to several hundred people, some draped in union flags, before they marched through terraced side streets and stopped outside the home of a Romanian family. The Romanian family's windows had been "put out" twice before, but the family had refused to leave. Dozens of boys and men wearing hoods and masks surged forward, throwing bricks through windows, pushing fireworks through the letterbox, and setting the family's car on fire before men in balaclavas broke down the door. Women and children in the mob watched. One person said: "There's wee girls inside."
Similar scenes played out across Belfast. In the east of the city, families from Ukraine, Romania, Poland and Sudan left. Properties and vehicles, including a Glider bus, were set ablaze and smoke rose into the night. On arterial roads and by roundabouts, crowds lit bins and set up roadblocks to question and intimidate suspected foreigners. In Sandy Row, central Belfast, Ethiopian and Chinese residents fled and arsonists burned a Syrian supermarket. On Crumlin Road, in the west, Ugandan health workers and Nigerian families sought refuge. In some places police were absent or stayed back, and community volunteers escorted families to safety.
Daniel Holder, the director of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, said: "We could see it coming. It wasn't unprecedented, it was an escalation of an existing pattern." He said the violence was an escalation and a learning curve, with agitators drawing on lessons from the second anniversary of the Belfast riot in August 2024 and the first anniversary of the Ballymena eruption in June 2025 to hit more targets and reduce the chance of arrest. The report said far-right allies in England and the US were taking notes. Enrique Tarrio, the former head of the militant US group Proud Boys, recently visited Belfast and interviewed activists for a documentary. Last month, the Advance UK-affiliated YouTuber Sarah White streamed multiple events in Northern Ireland, including an Orange Order march and an anti-migrant protest in Portrush.
Paramilitary Involvement and Child Exploitation
Jon Boutcher, the chief constable of the Police Service Northern Ireland, said the overall picture of paramilitary involvement in the most recent trouble was "inconsistent" but that paramilitaries were present. Holder said police had been slow to recognise, at least in public, the role of paramilitary groups in controlling the violence. The UDA and UVF were fractured, with some factions urging restraint and others orchestrating much of the violence, according to independent observers. Firefighters had no doubt about paramilitary influence and sought permission from their leaders before tackling blazes, sources said.
Chris Quinn, Northern Ireland's children's commissioner, said the ferrying of teenagers to and from flashpoints was further evidence of orchestration. "There's been a long history of child criminal coercion and child criminal exploitation," he said. Some children were said to have joined the rioting to service debts, including drug debts, and another source, a youth worker, said paramilitary groups paid boys £100 to join the rioting.
Michaela Rafferty, of Anaka, a women's group that helped escort besieged families to safety, said: "There has been a sectarian element, obviously, through our years of Troubles and violence. Now that focus has kind of moved to brown and black people." The article said AI-generated anti-Islam murals had appeared in loyalist strongholds such as Moygashel and Newtownabbey, including slogans reading, "Islam is Heathen, Islam is Satanic — A New Evil Has Arisen," and "Not welcome, not wanted, not here."
Online Networks and Coordination
Dessie Donnelly of rabble.coop, a Belfast-based tech cooperative that tracks online xenophobia, said: "Ballymena was a watershed. You had loads of groups springing up online and a far-right network emerging." He said posts about dark-skinned men in parks and foreigners moving into houses of multiple occupation on particular streets proliferated before the riot. A researcher with Accountability Project Northern Ireland said activists in Belfast, Bangor, Coleraine, Derry, Newtownabbey, Portadown and other towns formed online "clusters" that shared and amplified posts and infiltrated online forums for loyalist bonfires and marching bands. The watchdog noticed that a Portadown-based Facebook group was circulating a screenshot of council-owned HMO properties, which rioters used in June.
The year to 31 March — 4 months ago — saw police record 2,367 race incidents and 1,507 race crimes, the highest on record. Naomi Green, the Northern Ireland-based assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said: "We thought it was going to get quite scary very quickly, and it did." A week before the riot, anti-racism organisations convened an emergency meeting in Belfast because they feared trouble, Holder said. He said: "For a third successive summer, it was waiting on an excuse." Mohammed Mahmoud, 39, said as a crowd gathered near his Sandy Row grocery store on the afternoon of 9 June: "We've been sharing the same messages all day: go home early, stay inside, don't go out."
The next day, central Belfast was largely shut and quiet, but in Glengormley, 7 miles north, a mob tried to march on the Chimney Corner hotel, which had been used to house asylum seekers, and fought police in riot gear. The crowd hurled bricks and rocks, lit bonfires in the street and torched a vacant house. Police used water cannon and plastic bullets to drive them back. Around 11pm the violence dwindled and stopped.
Public Opinion and the Aftermath
The aftermath remained troubling. In a More in Common poll, 8% of people in Northern Ireland said it was justified to burn migrants out of their homes and 11% agreed with intimidating them out of an area. Forty-one per cent said they sometimes feel like a stranger in their own country and three-quarters worry about asylum seekers entering Northern Ireland. Conleth Burns, the associate director and Ireland lead for More in Common, said polling in England showed similar results. "You've got a similar number of people in lots of societies who think that this level of violence against migrants is justified," he said. He added that Northern Ireland has far fewer foreigners and people of colour than England, which shows that even small numbers can have an outsized impact. Most people expressed concern about immigration, racism and violence, he said. "People don't see [those views] as being contradictory."
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue said the unrest turbo-charged far-right activism online, with posts promoting claims of anti-white police bias surging to more than 200,000 in the first two weeks of June compared with 104,000 in the whole of May.
Stormont's Failure to Act
The main parties at Stormont strongly condemned the violence, but critics said the executive failed to prepare for the crisis. Donnelly said: "This was the third time in two years. They should have known something would happen, it was building up." He said there was no acknowledgment that immigrants had been systematically attacked twice and that it would happen again. Holder said Stormont's response had downplayed the gravity of the crisis. "You'd expect a racist pogrom to be the key issue for the institutions to deal with over the summer, and putting in emergency measures to prevent that happening again. But no, there's no sense of urgency," he said.
Liz Griffith, the head of migration justice at the Northern Ireland Law Centre, said the devolved government had failed to update anti-racism legislation and downgraded a long-awaited policy document. She said the strategy now focused on "race relations", which she called "a discredited term now; it is woefully out of date and has been out of date since the 1970s." Holder said: "It's as if this was to do with somehow the relationships of people not getting on with each other. That the people having the brick put through their window need to improve their relationship with those putting the brick through the window." Griffith said the Stormont executive had failed to bring forward hate crime and race equality laws in line with the rest of the UK. "The law in itself does not prevent racism but it's the bedrock on which all your other initiatives rest," she said. "It's been updated in England, Scotland and Wales, and ours is just antiquated. There's constant talk of consultation after consultation to update this legislation, but it has just got stuck, it's never moved."
Naomi Green said many wanted Andy Burnham, the new prime minister, to step in. "Unless Westminster intervenes at this point and ensures that there are protections, and legal protections, and consequences for some of this behaviour, unless there is some accountability here, it's going to continue," she said. Suleiman Abdulahi, the founder and director of Horn of Africa People's Aid Northern Ireland, said he had endured many attacks and reported 12 of them, most recently on 26 June — 1 month ago. None had resulted in a prosecution. He said: "I'm not saying the Northern Ireland people – the majority – are racist. The majority are hospitable."
Why This Matters:
The Belfast riots exposed a systemic failure of devolved government to protect minority communities from organised racist violence. For the third successive summer, families were driven from their homes while police stood back and Stormont failed to enact modern hate crime legislation or emergency measures. The exploitation of children by paramilitary groups, the coordination of violence through online networks, and the international attention from far-right figures like Enrique Tarrio reveal a crisis that demands urgent Westminster intervention. With race crimes at record highs and 8% of the public justifying arson attacks on migrants' homes, Northern Ireland's outdated legal framework and political inaction have created a vacuum filled by paramilitaries and online agitators. The victims — healthcare workers, shopkeepers, families who fled war — deserve legal protection, police accountability, and a government that treats racist pogroms as the emergency they are. Without reform, the pattern will repeat next summer.