The latest wave of racist loyalist rioting in the North of Ireland is not an aberration. It is the inevitable result of Britain’s continued colonial presence and the loyalist formation it has long nurtured as a bulwark of control. These riots are not expressions of legitimate anger from an abandoned working class – they are acts of racist reaction, driven by a loyalist stratum fearful of losing its few remaining privileges amidst a crisis of British imperialism.
Racism not resistance
The most recent trigger came on 9 June in Ballymena, after two 14-year-old boys, understood to be Romanian, appeared in court accused of sexual assault. Although the initial protest was peaceful, loyalist gangs led by the South East Antrim Brigade of the Ulster Defence Association quickly seized the moment to incite racist hysteria. The result: nights of rioting, spreading to Larne, Portadown, Belfast and Derry. Eighty-one officers from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) were reported injured – a figure used to justify more police funding. Police Scotland was called in for support, and Stormont Justice Minister Naomi Long, of the Alliance Party, secured £5m in emergency police funds. Sinn Féin First Minister Michelle O’Neill backed the increase – aligning herself, once again, with the colonial state’s repressive apparatus.
The colonial utility of loyalism
For decades, loyalist paramilitaries acted as state-sponsored death squads of British imperialism in the north. They were rewarded with jobs, housing, and de facto political control. That material privilege is now being eroded, but its legacy lives on in the loyalist readiness to scapegoat migrants, Travellers, Catholics and the poor. This isn’t resistance — it is the defence of a dying supremacy.
The state’s response reveals the enduring utility of loyalism. Police stood by and openly admitted to only intervening where there was a threat to life. Compare this to the treatment of nationalist youth. Repressive power in the Six Counties is never neutral – it is structured to protect the colonial order.
And while loyalist leaders talk of cultural heritage, the reality is burning in plain sight. On 11 July, across the North of Ireland, the annual bonfires which are precede the 12 July celebration of the anniversary of Protestant ascendancy bore effigies of migrants, anti-racist activists, and nationalist figures – all torched with glee. These acts are not simply those of fringe extremists. They are a public celebration of supremacy. The Orange Order, far from being a cultural or fraternal group, is revealed once more as a far-right, racist and sectarian organisation, a key pillar of Britain’s reactionary scaffolding in Ireland.
From revolutionary nationalism to respectable betrayal
The retreat of revolutionary nationalism has created a new political situation throughout Ireland. The defeat of the anti-imperialist wing of the republican movement has cleared the way for a politics of accommodation and betrayal. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was not a peace settlement – it was a political deal with imperialism which brought Sinn Féin into governance, not to dismantle British rule but to help manage it.
Sinn Féin’s electoral ambitions in the South have further cemented its retreat from principled working-class politics, as it courts votes from both bourgeois respectability and reactionary sections of the working class in order to be electable. Michelle O’Neill’s support for increased PSNI funding amid loyalist violence exemplifies this collapse. Faced with reaction, Sinn Féin offers not resistance, but reinforcement – more police, more money, more British reinforcements.
FRFI has long argued that the GFA did nothing to end structural segregation or systemic repression. Instead, it produced a nationalist leadership committed to border management and backing of the PSNI – the very institution that continues to repress working-class communities in the North.
Reaction in nationalist Areas: the price of political retreat
In the absence of revolutionary leadership, working-class nationalist communities have been left ideologically adrift. Racist narratives have taken hold, no longer challenged by organised anti-imperialist resistance. The rot has spread — not just from loyalist areas, but into nationalist ones too.
One grotesque symptom of this decay is the unholy alliance between loyalist thugs and self-proclaimed ‘Republicans’ in the South. In summer 2024, during the racist riots in Belfast, a group calling itself ‘Coolock Says No’ emerged in a working-class suburb of Dublin in opposition to a proposed local asylum centre.
Its members then marched north alongside British and Unionist banners. One contingent even wandered into Lower Ormeau — a republican area of Belfast — and were forcibly ejected by residents. Their shock at the reception speaks volumes. These were not republicans defending Irish sovereignty, as they claimed — they were bigots wrapped in tricolours, marching for white supremacy.
Shorn of its revolutionary and anti-imperialist content, nationalism inevitably becomes chauvinistic and reactionary. The decline of armed struggle and mass resistance has opened the door to reactionary creep within neglected working-class areas. This is not simply a matter of electoral betrayal. It is the result of a historic failure by Sinn Fein to conduct serious political education within the working class — to teach that migrants, Travellers, and other marginalised communities are not enemies but fellow victims of the same capitalist-imperialist system.
James Connolly warned us over a century ago: “If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain.” That warning echoes louder now than ever. Without socialist content, nationalism is easily co-opted by imperialist logic — or worse, turned against itself.
For a new anti-imperialist resistance
The real responsibility for defeating racism lies with those committed to rebuilding an anti-imperialist movement rooted in working-class nationalist communities, North and South. That movement must be uncompromising: anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and hostile to all institutions of imperialist power – including the PSNI and the Stormont ‘parliament’. It must speak the language of struggle, not respectability.
As anti-imperialists in Britain, our task is not just to support Irish liberation in words, but to actively oppose British imperialism from within — exposing its institutions, its opportunist defenders, and building solidarity rooted in revolutionary politics.
Respectable nationalism has not just failed — it has actively enabled the growth of racism and reaction. There is no parliamentary road to liberation. Only revolutionary resistance, grounded in internationalism and class struggle, can break the cycle of reaction and reclaim the promise of a free and socialist Ireland.
Paul Mallon
