When Belfast came to international attention in June 2026 as loyalist¹ mobs burned immigrants out of their homes, an outsider would be forgiven for being shocked. The reality is, however, that to those of us who have had to live with loyalism, nothing was surprising about what was just the latest episode in the ideology’s centuries-old tradition of burning the people they designate as enemies out of their homes. As the writer Michael Magee, writing during the week of the burnings out, said: ‘The most chilling thing about Belfast this week was not the fires. It was how familiar everything felt.”²

What differentiates the north of Ireland from the rest of the western world, where this type of reactionary politics has been on the rise for the last decade at least, is the region’s long history of settler colonial violence that began to take its modern form with the plantation of Ulster in the 17th century, continued through Ireland’s revolutionary period in the early 20th century, the ‘Troubles’ in the mid- to late-20th century, and survives to this day. The reason loyalism can call on a hardcore to immediately escalate any situation that can be used to its advantage to the kind of extreme mob violence not typically seen elsewhere such as Britain or Europe, is that it has, even in times of so-called peace, retained its paramilitary organisations, who now act as a reserve force to be called upon and sprang into action at the drop of a hat. There are, at last estimate, 12,500 active loyalist paramilitaries in the north³, split between the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), whose numbers count 7,500, and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), numbering 5,000. These are not the disgruntled subcontractors of other nearby right-wing movements, like those who blocked motorways to protest fuel duty in the Republic this year, or their comrades in England who vote Reform. These loyalists are the legacy and continuation of the paramilitaries who operated as British state-sponsored murder gangs during the Troubles, more similar in both ideology and action to the Contras in Nicaragua or the neofascist Ordine Nuovo in Italy than any other organisations within the political realms of Britain or Ireland. In the 28 years since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, they have, for the most part, transitioned into narco-terrorist outfits, controlling the north’s drug trade, extorting businesses within loyalist enclaves for protection money, and occasionally being sucked into episodes of internecine killing related to the drug trade or the settling of old feuds. Still, their political character has survived a time of having no visible enemy, and while their membership mainly functions on a day-to-day basis as foot soldiers of the aforementioned, they remain ready to be activated in other ways at a minute’s notice when loyalism gets its excuse.

The excuse this time was a grisly video of a Sudanese migrant, hereafter claiming asylum, having come to Belfast via bus from Dublin, attacking a man with a knife on a street in Belfast. The attack, in which the man cut at his victim’s neck, eyes, face, and back with a kitchen knife until a passerby stopped him by striking him with a hurl, scandalised the local population and media. The scandalisation was understandable; the video was gruesome in the extreme, not the kind of thing anyone expects to wake up to see on a Tuesday morning, not least from a street in north Belfast. While that area of Belfast in particular saw some of the worst violence of the ‘Troubles’, the seemingly random nature of this attack and the fact that it had been caught on camera and widely shared served to differentiate it from the norm. 

Loyalism’s Predictable Cycle of Reaction

If the scandalisation was understandable, the reaction that came was predictable. Violent knife crime is nothing new to the north. More than any imagined epidemic of migrant violence loyalism would have the rest of us believe is happening here, the north is actually suffering from an onslaught of violence against women and girls. Between 2020 and now, 30 women have been murdered in a region with a population of 1.9 million, most of them within their own homes, most of them by someone known to them.⁴ The week before the north Belfast attack, Stephen McCullough, who killed his pregnant girlfriend Natalie McNally in a knife attack so frenzied and complex that pathology couldn’t determine the fatal sequence, was sentenced to a minimum of 31 years in prison. Loyalism, with its own femicides such as the unsolved disappearance of Lisa Dorrian, did not spring to defend local women or burn down McCullough’s house. Men who kill their partners or other women are not the enemy in the eyes of loyalists; for them, there are two enemies: the age-old enemy of republicanism and the new enemy, the north’s tiny migrant population.

With physical force republicanism⁵ no longer an ongoing concern in the politics of the north, it was always likely that it was that tiny migrant population that would provide the excuse to assert its power, for which loyalism is always looking. As with any population, members of it will commit crimes; sometimes, they don’t even have to. Similar burnings out erupted in 2025, in nearby Ballymena, when two teenage Romani boys from Romania were charged with the attempted rape of a teenage girl. Nine days of rioting and burning out under the instructions of loyalist paramilitaries followed, the result of which was local estimates of two-thirds of Ballymena’s Romani population fleeing the town.⁶ That the case was dropped after “significant evidential developments”⁷ meant that it no longer met the threshold for prosecution in November 2025 meant nothing to loyalism. They had gotten what they wanted.

This time, a crime was definitely committed; the video was seen widely throughout the north. As with the alleged crime in Ballymena, the defining factor wasn’t the crime itself, but the skin colour and ethnicity of the alleged perpetrators. If loyalism was disgusted by extreme knife crime, the UVF and Orange Order would not allow Eddie McIlwaine – a member of the Shankill Butchers gang who killed at least 23 civilians, the majority of them Catholics, six of them with their throats cut by butchers’ knives – to associate with them to this day.⁸ Yet the result was the same as Ballymena: days of rioting saw migrants harassed, attacked, and burned out of their homes once again. 

The modus operandi of the loyalists during this orchestrated disorder is clever. Taking advantage of the light-touch policing that always meets these events – the kind that would never be tolerated if republican mobs sought to burn people from their homes – the loyalists use their sway within their local power bases. Whether it’s through coercion or ideological sympathy, of course varies case-by-case, but the paramilitaries instruct the teenagers of the estates that they control to undertake the confrontation of the police presence and the burnings out, knowing that a teenager doing so will receive a much lighter punishment than an adult if caught. The north’s Children’s Commissioner spoke in the wake of the recent riots of teenagers being ‘ferried’ into Belfast to participate, with one child told that their participation would wipe out a £500 drug debt that they had incurred to the paramilitaries.⁹

While loyalism’s way of working has changed in the days since the Good Friday Agreement was signed, its targets essentially have not: the civilians of the population they have designated as the other. During the Troubles, 85% of the UVF’s victims were civilians, 80% of the UDA’s were too. Of course, not all of these civilians were Catholics from the republican community, but the majority were. Unable or unwilling to take the fight to the Provisional IRA – both groups actually killed more loyalist paramilitaries than republican ones – the loyalist paramilitaries instead settled on a strategy of terrorising the civilian population in the areas from which the IRA came, engaging in random drive-by shootings, bombings, and more extreme violence like that of the Shankill Butchers.

Centuries of Burnings Out

The terrorisation and ethnic cleansing of the political opponents they deem to be the other is foundational to loyalism. In the late 18^th century, the period in which the opposing forces of Irish national liberation – republicanism and loyalism – formed, as violence and provocation from the British crown forces and the proto-loyalist mob the Peep o’ Day Boys led to the foundation of the proto-republican Defenders, who defended Catholic farmsteads from attacks, which culminated in “a regular pogrom” in County Armagh “and the counties adjoining” (all part of the modern-day northern state). The method and the result echo today: “The victims, fleeing from their burning homes, spread panic all through Catholic Ireland.”¹⁰ When the Peep o’ Day Boys morphed into the Orange Order, the point at which proto-loyalism became loyalism, in the winter of 1795/96, 7,000 Catholics were driven from County Armagh.

The Orange Order is still to this day the organisation that gives loyalism its character. Founded to “disrupt and destroy [the first ever Irish republican organisation] the United Irishmen and the Defenders [which] functioned, the one as a great liberating force, and the other as a tenants’ protection league and an agrarian trade union”, the Order “functioned as a “union-smashing” force, operating in the interest of an oligarchical clique threatened with overthrow by a revolutionary-democratic advance”. They are, according to the English Marxist historian T.A. Jackson, “the first Fascist body known in history”.¹¹

If loyalist pogroms and burnings out marked the foundation of Irish national liberation’s two opposing forces, they did the same for the foundation of the two states that make up modern-day Ireland. The Government of Ireland Act 1920, passed in November 1920 and brought into force in May 1921 during what is erroneously known as Ireland’s War of Independence, officially partitioned Ireland into the two states that exist today. While Irish and British MPs, unionist and republican alike, wrangled in Parliament over the Bill as it passed through Parliament throughout 1920, loyalists sought to cement their stranglehold on Ireland’s north-east, the six counties that would eventually make up the northern state. In June 1920, following a week of rioting and violence in Derry, Catholics were burned out of the majority loyalist Waterside area. This tactic then spread to Belfast on a more significant scale after Ulster Unionist Party leader Edward Carson, speaking at the Orange Order’s annual 12^th of July celebrations, said that he was “sick of words without actions” with regard to supposed British Government inaction against the IRA and said that loyalists would take action into their own hands if necessary.¹²

Once the workers of Belfast shipyards – the dominant industry in all of Ireland at the time – returned from their 12^th of July holidays on the 21^st, a meeting of “all Unionist and Protestant workers”¹³  drew over 5,000 attendees, who heard speeches that all “non-loyal”¹⁴ workers should be expelled from the shipyards. 8,000 workers were expelled from shipyards, industrial sites, and linen mills. The majority of these were Catholics, but not all; so-called rotten Prods – trade unionists and socialists – were also expelled. The three days of rioting that followed claimed the lives of 11 Catholics, eight Protestants, and left hundreds of people injured. A loyalist mob attempted to burn down a Catholic convent on the Newtownards Road in loyalist east Belfast.

The Catholic Protection Committee found that, overall, “a total of 10,000 men and 1,000 women workers were expelled, about 10 per cent of the nationalist population of Belfast”.¹⁵ These actions met with approval from the loyalist political elite. James Craig, then an MP for Mid Down, and soon-to-be the first Prime Minister of the northern state, a man who had once declared himself “an Orangeman first and a Member of Parliament afterwards”, stated: “Do I approve of the actions you boys have taken in the past? I say yes.”¹⁶

On the same day as the shipyard expulsions in Belfast, Catholics were being burned out of their homes in Banbridge, County Down. After the funeral of British Army lieutenant Gerald Smyth, who had been killed by the IRA, 3,000 loyalists took to the streets of the town and burned and looted Catholic houses. Catholics were driven from their jobs in the town, too, like the Belfast expulsions, and many fled Banbridge.¹⁷ Two days later, a crowd of 500 attacked Catholic homes in nearby Dromore, as well as the Catholic parochial house.¹⁸ By the end, the majority of Catholics had left both Banbridge and Dromore, with over 1,000 Catholics eventually driven from their jobs throughout the following August and September in the Bann Valley area that encompasses Banbridge and its surrounds.¹⁹  

The Smyth killing also led to tensions in Lisburn, which escalated in August when the IRA assassinated Royal Irish Constabulary Inspector Oswald Swanzy in the town’s Market Square. Swanzy was killed in reprisal for his role in the murder of Tomás Mac Curtain, the republican Lord Mayor of Cork. In the three days and nights following the Swanzy killing, a loyalist mob – likely organised by the UVF – burned and looted almost every Catholic business in the town and attacked Catholic homes.²⁰ The results of these attacks were approximately one third of Lisburn’s Catholic population – about 1,000 people – fleeing, and the town being left looking like “a bombarded town in France”²¹ during the First World War. The Swanzy killing also led to 100 Catholic homes being burned in Belfast. Burnings continued through 1921 and 1922 and became a central aspect of an era that, until the term was superseded, was known as ‘the Troubles’.

What started the more famous ‘Troubles’ – a euphemistic term in both cases coined to downplay that both were stages in Ireland’s various wars for national liberation – is a matter of some debate, but what marked the escalation into full-blown war is widely accepted to be the Battle of the Bogside in Derry city and the Belfast riots that followed the battle in August 1969. Following republican protests and attacks on the Royal Ulster Constabulary – the successor to the Royal Irish Constabulary after partition – and the killing of an on-leave British Army soldier, loyalist mobs began to attack Catholic homes in west Belfast, beginning the burnings out on Divis Street. Two-thirds of the houses on Conway Street were burned out as the RUC watched on. Houses were burned on Cupar Street and Kashmir Road; most famously, almost every single house on Bombay Street was burned out.²²

The Concoction of a Crisis

In times of political crisis, all of which the late 18^th century, the 1920s, and the 1960s were in terms of Ireland’s constitutional future, loyalism has shown that it will retreat to what it was founded upon: the targeting of the civilian ‘other’ population and the burning out of their homes to thin out the herd in Ireland’s north east corner and drive those not loyal to Britain’s domination of Ireland elsewhere. What differentiates the burnings of this summer and last summer is that there is no comparable political crisis taking place. Sinn Féin, loyalism’s eternal republican enemy, currently holds the position of First Minister atop the northern state’s Assembly, often criticising the largest unionist party, the Democratic Unionist Party, for not allowing the partitioned state’s institutions to work more smoothly. They have become fully ensconced within the partition of Ireland, finding power and comfort in their position as the largest republican party in the country and offering no sign of ending the partition any time soon.

Of course, the loyalists, operating under the racist tenets of their ideology, would call immigration a political crisis. Even if we were to entertain the fundamentally racist idea that people from other countries represent a threat to political and social order, which of course we shouldn’t, the reality could not be further from the loyalist position. The immigrant population of the northern state is minuscule. The northern state has a population of 1.9 million people, approximately 6% of whom were born outside of Britain or Ireland.²³ As of March 2026, there were just 2,379 people claiming asylum within the northern state, as the attacker in north Belfast was. This figure is a reduction on the already tiny amount of 3,030 claiming asylum in March 2023.²⁴ There are somewhere between 61,000²⁵ and 65,000²⁶ non-white people living in the north, making it significantly less diverse than any region in Britain or the southern state in Ireland.

No such ‘crisis’ of immigration exists, despite what the loyalist paramilitaries and the unionist politicians in the DUP and even further right-wing Traditional Unionist Voice might tell you. In the aftermath of the attack in north Belfast, the TUV MLA Timothy Gaston spoke of the importation of an “alien culture”, but the only thing that seemed to separate the attacker from loyalism’s long, bloody history was the lack of political motive and collusive backup from the highest echelons of the British security state. The only crisis is the continued existence of the loyalist paramilitaries.

The Failure of Good Friday

When the Good Friday Agreement was signed in April 1998, bringing an end to the war that had been escalated in August 1969, it contained the provision that all paramilitary groups would be subject to the decommissioning of their arms within two years. This deadline was not reached, but the Provisional IRA, by far the largest republican paramilitary, did engage in the process and gradually decommissioned, eventually fully decommissioning on 24 September 2005. The UVF and UDA completed decommissioning in 2009 and 2010 respectively. Since the decommissioning process, the IRA has receded from the public eye. While some veterans of its campaign remain publicly visible through their involvement with Sinn Féin, the IRA is no longer a political or social force in its own right. While the smaller Irish National Liberation Army still exists, along with other dissident republican groupings who are largely infiltrated by British intelligence and impotent, republican paramilitaries hold nothing comparable to the sway the UVF and UDA do within loyalist communities.

Though they may have ‘decommissioned’ their arms, the UVF and UDA continue to dominate their strongholds through racketeering, drug dealing, assault, murder, and any other form of gangsterism imaginable. When it was reported in 2023 that hate crimes had risen in the north by 70%, the police force placed the blame at the feet of the UVF.²⁷ Despite this, the loyalist paramilitaries still operate with relative impunity. They have done so due to their status as proxies of the British state. During his investigations into British state collusion during the ‘Troubles’, former Metropolitan Police chief John Stevens had 210 loyalist paramilitaries arrested; 207 of them were “agents or informers of the state”.²⁸ There is nothing to suggest this hand-in-glove relationship has changed in these times of ‘peace’; little else could explain the freedom with which the paramilitaries continue to operate.

The power of loyalist paramilitaries extends to the halls of political power, where they have successfully pressured unionist political parties into withdrawing from agreements such as the one in 2018 that sought to resurrect the Stormont Assembly. Nothing will change while they are allowed to hold the people within their communities and the larger population of the north hostage. The burnings out of Catholic areas only halted when the republicans within those communities self-organised into republican paramilitaries capable of taking the fight to both the loyalists and their puppet masters in Britain. No such strength in numbers or political cohesion exists within the immigrant community in the north as it did in the Catholic community in the late 1960s, making any self-defence measures a non-starter for those who find themselves the targets of the loyalists these days. Even if such an initiative were to be taken up, it would not be met with the light-touch policing that the loyalists deal with.

The answer to the problem is the same as the answer to all of the problems in the north: the removal of the British hand from Ireland and the nullifying of loyalism’s guarantors. That prospect seems as dim as the prospect that more immigrants will not be burned out of their homes soon. While Sinn Féin may hold the office of First Minister in the Assembly, the achievement of the 32-county republic is a remote possibility; the Good Friday Agreement, to which Sinn Féin clings as its roadmap to Irish unity, stipulates that only the British Secretary of State for the north can call the border poll vote that would allow the Irish people to vote – albeit in two separate votes, north and south – for unity. The agreement specifies no criteria for such a vote, and there is no way to compel the Secretary to specify the criteria. Ireland’s constitutional future lies entirely within the gift of the British Government, the same government whose intelligence services run the loyalist paramilitaries; the same government who have shown no interest in ever calling a border poll, whether Labour or Tory. In March 2021, the UVF and UDA ended their participation in the Good Friday Agreement. The paramilitaries are playing on a different field entirely from modern-day republicanism and can still bring the northern state to a standstill at a minute’s notice, once again illustrating the futility of attempting to operate within the state at all. While republicans fiddle in the partitioned political institutions that they once swore to never enter, Belfast, Ballymena and elsewhere will continue to burn. 

Odrán de Bhaldraithe is a Belfast-based author from Kilkenny who has written on colonialism, culture, and socialist republicanism. His book Neglect in the North of Ireland, published by Ebb Books in 2023, examines systemic under-investment in health, housing, and politics under British rule.

1.  Loyalism is a strand of Ulster unionism typically associated with paramilitaries and the furthest right-wing elements of an already right-wing ideology. It is Ulster’s variant of British nationalism that imbues Irish Protestants descended from British planters with a racial and ethnic superiority to other ethnic groupings in Ireland. Its main raison d’etre is the maintenance of the union between Britain and the north of Ireland. ↩︎
2.  Magee, M. (2026) I wish I could say this is not my Belfast – but mob rule has never been far away. The Independent. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/belfast-northern-ireland-troubles-anti-immigrant-riots-b2993848.html (Accessed: 20 June 2026). ↩︎
3.  Dempster, S. (2020) Loyalist paramilitary groups in NI ‘have 12,500 members’. BBC. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-55151249 (Accessed: 20 June 2026). ↩︎
4.  Nic Uilliam, J. (2026). 30 femicides in Northern Ireland since 2020 — Belfast rally demands ‘not one more’. The Detail. Available at: https://thedetail.tv/articles/30-femicides-in-northern-ireland-since-2020-belfast-rally-demands-not-one-more (Accessed 20 June 2026). ↩︎
5.  “Physical force republicanism” is a term used in Ireland to describe those willing to use violence to achieve a 32-county independent Irish republic. The term differentiates these organisations, such as the pre-Good Friday Agreement Provisional IRA, from those who claim to follow the same goal through exclusively parliamentary means, such as modern day Sinn Féin. ↩︎
6.  Carroll, R. (2025) ‘The place is empty, a lot have left’: Ballymena weighs up impact of anti-migrant riots. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/19/ballymena-impact-anti-migrant-riots-northern-ireland (Accessed 20 June 2026) ↩︎
7.  Romanian teens accused of rape attempt that sparked riots have charges dropped. BBC. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crl9kd2pne2o (Accessed 20 June 2026) ↩︎
8.  Reid, K. (2023). Shankill Butcher Eddie McIlwaine spotted marching in Whiterock parade. Belfast Telegraph. Available at: https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/shankill-butcher-eddie-mcilwaine-spotted-marching-in-whiterock-parade/a/113233120.html (Accessed 20 June 2026) ↩︎
9.  Coyle, C. (2026) Teenagers ‘ferried’ to Belfast race riots to clear paramilitary drug debts, Children’s Commissioner says. The Irish News. Available at: https://www.irishnews.com/news/northern-ireland/teenagers-ferried-to-belfast-race-riots-to-clear-paramilitary-drug-debts-childrens-commissioner-says-Q2GBXTJTYVD7DDVBICVGY2H6LU/ (Accessed 20 June 2026) ↩︎
10.  Jackson, T.A. (1970). Ireland Her Own: An Outline History of the Irish Struggle. New York: International Publishers, p. 144. ↩︎
11.  Ibid, p. 145. ↩︎
12.  Magill, C. (2020). Political Conflict in East Ulster, 1920–22. Martelsham: Boydell Press, p. 42. ↩︎
13.  Phoenix, É. & Parkinson, A. (2010), Conflicts in the North of Ireland, 1900–2000. Dublin: Four Courts Press, p. 72 ↩︎
14.  Glennon, K. (2020). “The Dead of the Belfast Pogrom”. The Irish Story. Available at: https://www.theirishstory.com/2020/10/27/the-dead-of-the-belfast-pogrom-counting-the-cost-of-the-revolutionary-period-1920-22/ (Accessed 29 June 2026) ↩︎
15.  Moore, C. (2020). “The eruption of sectarian violence in Belfast’s shipyards during July 1920 would define Belfast’s future”. The Irish News. Available at: https://www.irishnews.com/arts/2020/07/15/news/the-eruption-of-sectarian-violence-in-belfast-s-shipyards-during-july-1920-would-define-belfast-s-future-2004487/ (Accessed 29 June 2026) ↩︎
16.  Macardle, D. (1951). The Irish Republic. Dublin: Ambassador Books, p. 387 ↩︎
17.  Lawlor, P. (2009). The Burnings, 1920. Cork: Mercier Press, p. 67–77 ↩︎
18.  Ibid., p. 82-83. ↩︎
19.  Ibid., p. 81. ↩︎
20.  Ibid., p. 115-121. ↩︎
21.  “The Swanzy Riots, 1920”. Irish Linen Centre & Lisburn Museum. 2018. Available at: https://www.lisburnmuseum.com/virtual-museum/swanzy-riots/ (Accessed 29 June 2026) ↩︎
22.  Mallie, E. & Bishop, P. (1988). The Provisional IRA. Ailesbury: Corgi, p. 116-117. ↩︎
23.  Halpin, H. (2024) ‘How much immigration is there in Northern Ireland?’. BBC. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgm7vn2kegjo (Accessed 29 June 2026). ↩︎
24.  Home Office, ‘Immigration system statistics data tables’ [last updated 1 June 2026]. See Asylum seekers in receipt of support detailed datasets, year ending March 2026. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/immigration-system-statistics-data-tables (Accessed 29 June 2026) ↩︎
25.  Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (2022). Census 2021 main statistics ethnicity tables. Belfast. ↩︎
26.  Russell, R. (2025). International Migration in Northern Ireland: An Update. Belfast: Northern Ireland Assembly Research and Information Service. ↩︎
27.  Kilpatrick, C. (2023) ‘More Polish homes targeted by racist thugs in fresh bout of ‘ethnic cleansing’ by UVF’. Belfast Telegraph. Available at: https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/more-polish-homes-targeted-by-racist-thugs-in-fresh-bout-of-ethnic-cleansing-by-uvf/a/117505131.html (Accessed 29 June 2026) ↩︎
28.  (2015). ‘UK agents ‘worked with NI paramilitary killers’’. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32887445 (Accessed 29 June 2026) ↩︎