When a Belfast man went to check his house was safe after rioters set fire to a hijacked bus on Tuesday night, a masked mob threatened him.
“They thought I was a foreigner. They said I was a Paki bastard but I’m from here, I grew up here,” says the 23-year-old in a thick Belfast accent, not wanting to give his name.
Bullied for years because of the “colour of his skin”, the father of one shrugged his shoulders.
“I’m well used to it,” he says.
RM Block
The man stood outside his terraced home in Lendrick Street off the Newtownards Road in east Belfast on Wednesday morning where workmen boarded up multiple houses set alight during a night of disorder.
Television camera crews lined the area, which resembled a war zone by dawn, capturing pictures that evoked the worst years of Northern Ireland’s Troubles.
Images of this street engulfed in flames made international headlines in a week when anti-immigrant protests erupted into violence across the North.
Masked demonstrators blocked streets from 7pm on Tuesday following a knife attack in north Belfast on Monday.
Graphic video footage of the stabbing incident went viral on social media. Elon Musk, the provocative US-based trillionaire owner of social media network X, and anti-immigration and far-right activist Tommy Robinson – whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – were among high-profile figures sharing lists of locations directing demonstrators to where protests could take place.
Musk retweeted a post by Rupert Lowe, the leader of the nationalist Restore Britain party, saying “millions must go”, with a screengrab of the Belfast knife attack, in which the victim was left with serious life-changing injuries, including the loss of an eye.
Footage showed several people, including a man wielding a hurl, confronting the attacker on Kinnaird Avenue off the Antrim Road, a nationalist area of the city, until police arrived at 10.30pm.
Within hours of Sudanese national Hadi Alodid (30) being charged with the attempted murder of Stephen Ogilvie, rioters had burned out cars and torched migrant homes and businesses.
Police confirmed in a press conference how Alodid had come to Northern Ireland; he made his way from Sudan to Paris before flying to Dublin and then travelled by bus to Belfast in February 2023.
“Foreigners out! Foreigners out!” was shouted by a crowd of balaclava-clad men in a north Belfast street as they petrol-bombed houses before 11pm on Tuesday.
Children and pensioners locked themselves into bathrooms for protection.
Journalists and photographers were told to “get the f**k out” by rioters as we approached the burning Glider bus on the Newtownards Road in east Belfast earlier that evening; one photographer had his shins kicked and mobile phone stamped on by a mob.
The violence spilt into a second day.
Belfast shut down by teatime on Wednesday in advance of another night of violent clashes.
Schools closed before noon, businesses sent workers home and public transport was suspended.
The attacks had a more disruptive impact on a smaller group.
Twenty-seven people – the youngest a two-month-old baby – were left homeless by the vandalism. A photograph of a migrant child being placed in the back of a Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Land Rover with their family was discussed at Westminster, where British prime minister Keir Starmer condemned the “intolerable, sickening actions of racists”.
On Wednesday evening, masked men chased a nurse and intimidated her on her way to work in the Ulster Hospital in Dundonald to the east of Belfast, where she stayed on and finished her shift.
Overseas staff at Whiteabbey hospital in Co Antrim received threats. Workers living close to Belfast City Hospital – where the North’s regional cancer centre is based – had threatening letters put through their letterboxes.
“Racist, mindless, vile thugs” were blamed for the attacks by PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher who said the unrest reached levels not seen since “the worst possible days of the Troubles”.
Rioting was confined to loyalist areas but police said there was “no evidence” that loyalist paramilitaries had orchestrated the violence “at this stage”.
Police were in little doubt, however, about the role of social media in driving the unrest. There was “significant co-ordination” from “online social media activity” from within the North and “outside the island of Ireland”, said the police.
“That momentum, that drive, that toxicity, is what’s bringing people out on to the streets [and] needs to stop,” said PSNI assistant chief constable Ryan Henderson on Thursday.
It is the third summer in a row of anti-migrant violence in the North.
Race-related riots in Ballymena last summer were triggered by an alleged rape of a girl by two Romanian teenagers. Charges against the two boys were dropped last November.
Riots in South Belfast following the Southport stabbings in June 2024 were linked to far-right agitators spreading misinformation online the previous year.
“What we’ve seen in the North, in the Republic, in the UK and really across Europe and in the US too over the last few years is this gradual mainstreaming of anti-migrant sentiment, anti-migrant hostility, and the increased spillover of it offline,” says Ciarán O’Connor of counterextremism organisation The Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
“There is the use or misuse of the most popular platforms we use for news and information for the promotion and production of false, misleading, usually sensationalist claims about migrants, depicting them as criminals or sexual predators.”
Eruption of violence in Northern Ireland echoes the Troubles
Monitoring online hate, extremism and disinformation since 2018, O’Connor described the surge in anti-migrant hostility as “a post-Covid phenomenon” which has become “normalised” online.
Prominent influencers such as Musk or Robinson can “amplify” calls for protest, “especially in the wake of tragic situations such as what happened on Monday evening” in Belfast, says O’Connor.
“These kinds of figures who have these enormous followings online help absorb local incidents into broader transnational narratives and absorb shared grievances in different groups across the Border and across countries,” adds O’Connor, a senior analyst at the institute.
Online posts circulated ordering “all businesses to close” with “no exceptions” by 11am on Wednesday.
The family of Stephen Ogilvie, the victim of the stabbing incident, released a statement saying they were “devastated by the horrific attack” but pleaded for calm.
On Wednesday evening, a water cannon was deployed by police in Newtownabbey when more than 200 protesters attacked riot police, as officers attempted to prevent them from entering a hotel that was previously used to house asylum seekers.
Twelve police officers were injured and 16 people arrested, while violent protests also took place in Portadown.
“The way we’ve seen this play out is that there will be local protests, then there will be the content or clips of call to action or call to violence that emerge locally, but are then amplified by international accounts and channels of influencers,” says O’Connor.
Younger people, in particular, are being “swayed” by social media, the institute has found.
“In many ways, people are increasingly prone to being mobilised through very explicitly hateful extremist content on social media,” says O’Connor.
During the week it emerged a so-called hit list of addresses had been circulating online among far-right groups since August 2025 and was sent to the PSNI in January 2026.
People living in streets under threat came out of their homes to “show they were white”, says one east Belfast resident.
“These are communities where violence is a legitimate response. It is celebrated, not just tolerated in many ways,” according to Colm Walsh, a lecturer in criminology at Queen’s University Belfast.
Walsh has just completed a study of four nights of unrest in Ballymena last June.
“There’s an observation that emerges out of the research, the kinds of conditions that facilitate this type of widespread violence over multiple nights are very similar to what has happened this week,” says Walsh.
Housing conditions and people feeling “increasingly frustrated, disconnected” and mistrustful of public services are among the findings of the research.
People did not feel “their voices are being heard”.
“So you put all those conditions together and with a spark, no matter what it is, the crisis could be something different, next week, next month, next year, those conditions are really the context that allows and facilitates this serious violence to take place,” adds Walsh.
Two notable “shifts” have occurred since Brexit-related “No Irish Sea Border” riots in Belfast in 2021 – which Walsh has also analysed – that predominantly involved young loyalist male protesters.
“In Ballymena, there was much less evidence of paramilitary involvement, at least in the escalation of the violence,” he says.
The criminologist warns about social media becoming more “co-ordinated” in organising violent protests.
“At the minute, it’s their ability to bring people out on to the street via social media – but I’m not sure if it’s very well co-orindated. It feels like there’s a bit of disorganisation,” he says.
He expresses concerns about the increasing levels of race-related violence in the North.
“As you see trends in sectarianism go down, you see trends in hate crime go up,” adds Walsh.
“It’s almost like we have an issue with violence and it’s just being displaced and redirected elsewhere.”
Racial violence now outpaces sectarian attacks in Northern Ireland, rising by almost a third in the last year.
Racist incidents first surpassed sectarian incidents in 2017, with 1,044 race hate-motivated incidents recorded compared to 995 sectarian incidents that year.
Since then, reports of racist violence have remained high, but rose sharply the past year.
Between 2025 and 2026 racial hate incidents rose 31 per cent, from 1,807 in the year ending March 2025 to 2,367 in the year ending March 2026.
There was little disorder on Thursday night. By Friday morning, police confirmed there had been 19 arrests this week, “with people already charged to court”.
Photographs of some alleged rioters were quickly released by the PSNI to track down offenders, similar to what happened in Ballymena last year, following an initial delay to release the images.
“These few nights will pass, we’ll then be in summer season, and it will be a long few months ahead for people living in these communities,” says Walsh.
Back on Lendrick Street, the man subjected to racist taunts is making plans to move his family.
“No child should be exposed to this,” he says.
* Additional reporting by Andrew McNair
