The Scottish Socialist Party has condemned the appalling racist pogroms in Northern Ireland.
As explored in “Class not Creed, 1968 – Ireland’s lost opportunity for socialism, not sectarianism “, the trade union movement in Northern Ireland has a long history of opposing sectarian violence by uniting working-class people. The SSP calls for a working-class counterforce, in that same spirit, to deliver a fighting alternative for all working-class people in Ireland.
Originally of County Fermanagh, SSP National Trade Union Organiser Richie Venton wrote:
“The County Antrim town of Ballymena is in flames, with the worst outbreak of attempted racist pogroms since those stirred up by the far right in the wake of the Southport schoolgirls’ stabbings last August.
“The hate-filled attacks on ethnic minorities and immigrants unleashed in this medium-sized town – population just over 30,000 – have spread to other Northern Ireland towns and villages as nights go by, including Larne, Portadown, Coleraine, and parts of Belfast and Derry cities.
“People who have settled in Ballymena for several years – particularly since the 1990s ceasefires – are cowering in their homes, barricading front doors with sofas, hiding in their bedrooms and attics as thugs break down their front door, smash windows, and try to set fire to homes with children in them.
Passover, 2025
“In a desperate attempt to escape arson attacks and assaults on men, women and children, we see a grisly re-invention of the Biblical story of the Passover, in this former heartland of the ‘hellfire-and-damnation’ sectarian, Reverend Ian Paisley.
“In the book of Exodus, God allegedly told the Jews to smear their doors with the blood of a sacrificial lamb so he would ‘pass over’ their homes while smiting the Egyptians with his wrath, murdering their first-borns.
“In this real-life 2025 version. people who made Ballymena their home, with their kids making friends with the children of parents born locally, are posting national flags on their doors – sometimes with British Union flags, but accompanied by the flags of the Philippines, Bulgaria, Poland, etc – trying to avoid being mistaken for being Romanian. Because the latter are the primary targets, at least initially, of the hate-filled rioters.
Triggers to the riots
“What led to Ballymena being projected onto the world’s TV screens?
“The immediate background was the alleged sexual assault on a 14-year-old girl in the town and the immediate arrest of two 14-year-old boys of Romanian background, who denied the charge.
“An estimated 2,500 people gathered in a peaceful protest at this vile sexual assault, but then a breakaway crowd of several hundred went on the rampage, launching arson attacks on homes and cars, smashing the doors and windows of the homes of immigrants and ethnic minorities, alongside prolonged rioting against PSNI police, chucking masonry and firebombs at them.
“No doubt a large proportion of the initial crowd who gathered at the demonstration were there out of genuine concern at the inexcusable crime of sexual violence, but vicious far-right forces used their substantial reach on social media to incite openly racist violence from a minority, particularly but not exclusively by young people.
Rise of the far right in Ireland
“Underlying those immediate triggers is the worldwide phenomenon of decades of disappointment and betrayal by mainstream capitalist parties of what we’ve dubbed the ‘extreme centre’, carrying out neoliberal capitalist assaults on working-class communities, and the failure of the dominant leaderships of the mass organisations of the working class to adequately confront this with a fighting, inspiring socialist alternative, leading to the upsurge of far right formations.
“We see that with the rise of serial sexual abuser Trump; the growth of far right and even fascist forces around the AFD in Germany and Le Pen’s French equivalent; and of course, the multi-millionaire arch-Thatcherite conman Nigel Farage in Britain.
“Capitalist rule, regardless of party label, utterly failed working-class people worldwide, and in the absence of mass socialist forces, into the vacuum steps the evangels of red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism, dressed up in populist slogans and ruthless racist scapegoating of immigrants and ethnic minorities.
Nationalist and Loyalist racists
“Ireland is by no means immune from these trends. In fact, in the South of Ireland in the last few years, far-right forces (literally) wrapped up in the Irish tricolour, spouting an extreme version of Irish nationalism, have burnt down buildings housing asylum seekers, then put on their suits and tried to get elected to the Dail and councils in the South’s recent elections. Having been largely frustrated on that front – certainly at Dail level, although they got big votes and several councillors elected – they have now reverted to the politics of street violence.
“That’s the case in big cities like Dublin and Cork, but also in some of the border areas neighbouring towns in the North of Ireland, like Derry and Newry.
“Last August, during race-hate riots in Belfast, we witnessed the grotesque spectacle of far-right racist nationalists from Dublin waving the Irish tricolour, joining forces with far-right racist Loyalists hoisting the Union flag – a grisly embrace across the sectarian divide by two forms of the same reactionary forces.
“The far right in the North takes numerous forms, including openly fascist grouplets and, it would appear in the case of the Ballymena riots, the South East Antrim UDA. The remnants of the previous mass loyalist paramilitary group who now devote most of their time selling drugs – and not shirking from employing the services of Catholic drug dealers in their money-making racket! Masked-up members of that outfit have been seen at the heart of the riots.
‘Mainstream’ politicians fuel the fires of racism
“The far-right’s vicious racist propaganda has been normalised, imitated and reinforced by British Labour leaders, with Starmer’s notorious talk of “and island of strangers”, echoed by Labour’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Hilary Benn, amidst the height of this week’s race riots.
“Unionist politicians have consciously fanned the flames of hate, with Democratic Unionist Party Minister for Communities (!!) in the power-sharing government with Sinn Fein, Gordon Lyons, publicly announcing that a few of the migrant families terrorised out of their homes in Ballymena were being temporarily housed in Larne Leisure Centre – which led to a baying mob setting fire to their place of temporary refuge, screaming racist abuse about ‘dirty foreigners’.
Ballymena’s traditions
“Ballymena itself was the first town in the North blighted by serious heroin addiction – making for lucrative trade for the UDA and others. It’s also a town which had a powerful industrial base, including big Michelin and Gallaher factories in the past, with strong union organisation, and the record of the local trade union movement being instrumental in organising united demonstrations of Protestant and Catholic workers against sectarian intimidation and killings during ’The Troubles’, and more recently when Ballymena Trades Union Council countered far-right forces targeting migrant workers.
“In fact, in my youth I had friends who were active in a vibrant Ballymena branch of the Young Socialists; young Protestants and Catholics united in championing the cause of workers’ unity and socialism.
“But in recent years much of the industrial base in the town has been decimated, with Gallaher’s and Michelin’s factory closures about 8 years ago, wiping out nearly 2,000 jobs, thereby weakening the forces of the organised labour movement and lending itself to an atomization of the working class, where vicious propagandists of the far-right can latch onto concerns and discontent and channel it towards brutal division and racism.
Nothing to do with protecting women and girls
“Those who have incited and organised these attempted pogroms against Romanians and other ethnic minorities in a town which didn’t have a single asylum seeker funded in 2024, have absolutely no concern for the safety of women and girls. They are purely motivated by a desire to whip up division in the community.
Violence against women, including sexual violence and rape, runs rampant across Northern Ireland – and the authorities fail to deal with it. It suffers the second highest levels of femicide in Europe. In surveys, an astonishing 98% of women said they had suffered some form of gender-based violence during their lifetime.
“In that atmosphere, the cheap, deceitful slogan which the far right have deployed this week in Ballymena and elsewhere, of “Keep our children safe” – calling demos under the guise of ‘Concerned Parents’ – undoubtedly chimes with the worries of decent working-class people.
Racist ringleaders of the riots
“But the far-right instigators did nothing to demonstrate against allegations of child sexual abuse of his own daughters levelled against former Democratic Unionist Party leader Jeffrey Donaldson, nor the charge of rape of his stepdaughter towards Ballymena Traditional Unionist Voice councillor Davy Tweed.
“Furthermore, the local UDA is riddled with sex offenders, and widely known to have exploited teenage girls as part of settling drugs debts.
“The one difference between these cases is the colour of the targets’ skin; the far right have enlisted the services of rioters, including not just ideologically committed racists, but also an element of youth alienated from the police and mainstream politicians, who simply see this as an opportunity to have a good riot against PSNI cops.
“And as with the post-Southport race riots, the disaffected, despairing youth enlisted by cynical far-right ideologues are the ones getting the brunt of brutal police responses, including use of plastic bullets and jailings.
Ethnic minorities and entire working class the losers
“The immediate victims of this racist violence are ethnic minority and immigrant families – all of whom were either born in Ballymena or are legally recognised refugees, many of them working in local factories like Wrightbus, social care, the NHS, and agribusinesses.
“The wider losers are the broader working class, subjected to frenzied divisions, made all the weaker in their own self-defence against dilapidated housing conditions, cuts to services – including health, where the North has the longest waiting lists in the UK – and wages that are historically lower than in Britain for identical jobs. A working class deprived of decent wages, housing, health, education and other public services by a power-sharing coalition of Sinn Fein, DUP, Ulster Unionists and Alliance Party who slavishly accept the neoliberal diktats of big business and the bankers.
Hidden history of united workers’ movements
“The most studiously buried history of the past 50+ years in the North is that of several waves of united demonstrations and strike action by workers from all communities, against sectarian violence and deaths.
“At the height of tit-for-tat killings and bombings, workers across Northern Ireland came out on strike, staged rallies, drove back the paramilitaries, and in fact were instrumental in forcing the sectarian Orange and Green politicians to reach the unstable institutional ‘power-sharing’ arrangements known as the Peace Process.
“And whilst it suffered its share of sectarian clashes in the past, Ballymena was one of the many towns and cities where those displays of workers’ unity were staged – initiatives led by the cross community trade union movement, the biggest civic organisation in the North, on most occasions under the pressure of socialist trade unionists who forced the hesitant leadership of the trade union officialdom to take action.
Urgent need for united working-class counterforce
“That tradition of workers’ unity in action is urgently required today, to counter the attempted racist pogroms, and to undercut the false appeal of the far right with a vision of socialist change, to win decent jobs, vastly improved public services, and high-quality housing for all, regardless of creed, colour or country of birth.
“Encouraging beginnings of this counterforce to the rampaging racists have been organised over recent days. Trade unionists, community groups and socialists have staged counter-demos against the far right in nearby Magherafelt, Derry, the Beechmount area of west Belfast, and elsewhere, with a bigger one in Belfast on Saturday 14 June. These united demonstrations against race-hate and violence have begun to drive back the racists, stopping or outnumbering several of their planned gatherings.
For working-class unity and socialism
“Trade unionists and socialists in Scotland and beyond can and should assist those forces of working-class unity, and help them combat the vile forces of the far right by advocating radical socialist change; a transfer of the wealth of Scotland, Britain and Ireland away from the millionaires to the millions, with the goal of socialism in these islands, where all citizens are treated as equals, living in peace and harmony.
“The events of the past few days reinforce the beliefs I’ve held and fought for since my teens in County Fermanagh: for socialism not sectarianism, for action based on class not creed, for working-class unity in pursuit of a peaceful socialist future.
“The alternatives are all too ugly, as witnessed in this week’s eruption of racist conflagration.”
Class not Creed
Richie Venton was born in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, and went to the only multi-denominational secondary school on the county. That experience, combined with his lived experiences of poverty, inequality and discrimination, helped him become a socialist whilst still at school.
For the remainder of his life he has campaigned, organised, and written in the cause of working-class unity and socialism in Ireland.
He took part in united workers’ demonstrations against Tory austerity and sectarian divisions and killings during the Troubles, in Enniskillen and Belfast, as well as leading a nationwide ‘Campaign For Socialist Solutions in Ireland’ during his time in Liverpool. He has organised numerous solidarity tours for Irish workers in England and Scotland, including Waterford glassworkers, Belfast Montupet car workers, and Harland & Wolff shipyard workers.
He still has family in Fermanagh, regularly visits the North, and retains links with socialists and trade unionists on the ground.
He is the author of ‘Class not Creed, 1968 – Ireland’s lost opportunity for socialism, not sectarianism‘.
