Belfast descended into mob violence on Monday 8 June after a knife attack on Kinnaird Avenue, with families from minority backgrounds fleeing their homes as arsonists torched properties and vehicles across the city. A man straddled and repeatedly stabbed a figure lying on the ground shortly after 10.30pm on 8 June, in a bloody assault that ended only after onlookers intervened. Police had a suspect in custody by dawn on Tuesday 9 June — initially identified as a refugee from Somalia, later corrected to Sudan — but outrage spread anyway as footage circulated on X, WhatsApp, Facebook and Telegram.
By 9.30am on 9 June, 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 called it "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.
Orchestrated Violence Across the City
By early afternoon on 9 June, 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.
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.
Paramilitary Involvement and State Acquiescence
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. Daniel Holder, the director of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, 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.
Holder said the violence should not have come as a surprise. "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 a Belfast riot in August 2024 and the first anniversary of an eruption in Ballymena in June 2025 to hit more targets and reduce the chance of arrest. 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.
Record Race Crimes, Inadequate Legal Framework
The year to 31 March 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."
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 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 Policy Vacuum
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.
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. 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. 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 expose a dangerous vacuum at the heart of Northern Ireland's governance: paramilitary groups still control working-class areas, police struggle to enforce order, and Stormont has failed to update basic legal protections against race hate crime. Record levels of race incidents and crimes — 2,367 and 1,507 respectively in the year to 31 March — demonstrate a pattern of escalating violence that devolved institutions have refused to address with urgency. The poll finding that 8% of people believe burning migrants out of their homes is justified reflects a broader failure to integrate newcomers or reassure the public that migration is controlled. Northern Ireland's legal framework on race equality remains decades out of date, while England, Scotland and Wales have modernised theirs. Without Westminster intervention to impose enforceable standards and prosecutions, the cycle of orchestrated mob violence will continue, undermining public order and damaging Northern Ireland's international reputation. The presence of US far-right figures like Enrique Tarrio documenting Belfast's unrest suggests the region risks becoming a laboratory for extremist tactics exported across the Atlantic.