Racism sweeps across Northern Ireland

The latest quarterly hate crime figures in Northern Ireland have shown an alarming rise — a new police report entitled Incidents and Crimes with a Hate Motivation has found.

Published in collaboration with the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, it tracks six-strands of hate crimes — race, sexual orientation, sectarianism, saith/religion, disability and transgender identity.

A hate crime is defined as:

…any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic.

Whereas a hate incident is defined as any occasion where the victim or other person perceives a hate motivation, though it may not meet the severity required to constitute a crime.

Ballymena pogroms: whipping up hate crimes

The data attached to racially motivated crimes is the most striking, as the report explains:

There were 270 more race incidents and 112 more race crimes recorded [than for the previous year]. The number of both race incidents (2,048) and race crimes (1,280) are the third highest 12 month levels recorded since the data series began in 2004/05.

This compared to 1,778 incidents, and 1,168 crimes from October 2023 to September 2024. The largest spike occurred in June 2025, with race incidents up from 161 to 347. The rioting in Ballymena has been a key propellant of these crimes.

At the time, racist thugs committed pogroms following allegations of sexual assault against a teenage girl. This was falsely rumoured to have been carried out by two 14-year-old Romanian boys. Mass burning of properties occurred. Bigots targeted any residences they deemed ‘foreign’. A Guardian article reported that 800 Roma people had been ethnically cleansed from the town out of the estimated 1200. This outrage is not adequately reflected in the police report.

Similarly, in August 2020, bigoted loyalist rioters in Belfast smashed up shops owned by immigrants. Despite this, the racists appear to have outdone themselves in the past 12 months.

Notably grim recent incidents include a “viable device” — a bomb in other words — thrown inside Belfast Islamic Centre in June. Another attack on delivery drivers in East Belfast bordered on an attempted lynching. Two days ago, a Sudanese woman in Derry had her home sprayed with racist graffiti.

The long-term trend makes for grim reading too:

Four of the five highest monthly levels of race incidents in the data series were recorded between June and September 2025. The 347 race incidents recorded in June 2025 was the second highest monthly level in the data series, 2 lower than the 349 race incidents recorded in August 2024.

Rise in racism has been a 15 year long trend

There had been a decrease in hateful conduct between 2004/5 and the start of the following decade. Since then, a steady climb has taken effect. Many possible explanations exist for the trend. The line neatly parallels the onset of austerity, which has seen people’s standard of living stagnate or go backwards. This happens amidst the decimation of public services. It wouldn’t do for the politicians who implemented it, and the oligarchs that fund them, to come out and say “we’ve fucked you over with ceaseless class war for 15 years”. So, there’s instead been a concerted attempt to direct understandable public anger towards other targets — mainly Muslims and migrants.

The period coincides with the rise of smartphones and digital media, whose business model, pedalled by detached plutocrats, relies on emotive and hateful material. The rise of the far-right, forming an international ouroboros of bile feeding off itself, is another likely factor.

Professor of sociology at the University of Manchester Gary Younge observed:

One thing that differentiates this moment from others before it, where racial tension intermingled with xenophobia, is the global aspect of it. The same talking points about ‘the great replacement’ of ‘Indigenous’ white people, and the perceived threat to women in Europe, particularly from Black men, are showing up on my social media feeds and in discourse in the US, Ireland, the UK and across Europe.

Amnesty International condemn failure to kerb racist scourge

Patrick Corrigan, Northern Ireland Director for Amnesty International commented on these latest police figures:

This has been a shameful year of racist violence – from the targeting of families in Ballymena and other towns this summer to daily attacks on homes right across Northern Ireland.

Yet too many politicians have echoed anti-migrant misinformation that provides the backdrop to these attacks, rather than stand with the victims of hate crimes. Meanwhile, the Executive’s under-powered 2015-25 Race Equality Strategy has been a dismal failure. It expires in a month, with no agreed plan in place to follow. We urgently need a bold action plan …

The rise in hate incidents related to sexual orientation was relatively small, with just 4 additional occurrences. Targeting of transgender people saw an increase of 7 and 8 for incidents and crimes respectively. Meanwhile, sectarian incidents and crimes have seen an opposite trend to race related ones, with a fairly steady downward trajectory over the past 20 years.

Instead of tackling this dire state of affairs, the likes of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) are instead creating the conditions for crimes to thrive.

TUV leader Jim Allister’s response to the Ballymena riots was to speak of “very real grievances“. Meanwhile, the DUP amplify racist fictions peddled by the far-right. Leading figures in the party also aggrandise the ultimate racist project — the genocidal land theft operation which they refer to as ‘Israel’.

Their incompetence at governing and improving material conditions leads them to employ tools of distraction — at an appalling cost to people whose lives are blighted by the hatred they foster.

Featured image via Rights and Security International