For the past ten years, I’ve made my home in Cloughfern on the outskirts of the Northern Irish capital. Ten minutes’ walk one way, and you’re in Monkstown Wood, a nature reserve replete with birds, squirrels and a close community of dog walkers. Twenty minutes another way and you’re at Hazelbank Park on the shores of Belfast Lough, where the view takes in the iconic yellow Harland and Wolff cranes, and sweeps all the way north to the lighthouse at Whitehead.
But the scenes broadcast from the end of my street on Tuesday night, of masked rioters, petrol bombs and car hijackings, provoke revulsion. Far-right agitators such as Tommy Robinson and Reform leader Nigel Farage responded to a knife attack by a man believed to be an asylum seeker with dog-whistles, including calls to riot – pouring fuel on a fire that's been smouldering for weeks now.
People in Northern Ireland have muscle memory of violence, murder and riots in our not-very-distant past. We also have muscle memory on how to organise and help each other through.
Just two weeks ago, I called on a neighbour whose house had ‘locals only’ spray-painted on the wall. I wanted to see how he was and ask if there was anything I could do to help. This kind, warm man immediately brought me inside and showed me a letter he’d received from someone in the area. It was typed, printed out, with the contact details of local councillors and police and ended: “We have paint, and we can come over and paint out the graffiti. I am so ashamed that this happened to you.”
Despite how it might look in the news and on social media, the violence on our streets and neighbourhoods right now is being orchestrated by only a handful of people, many of whom don’t live here and have spent years normalising division and whipping up hatred for their own ends. Their message was amplified in particular by Grok (X’s AI tool) and on Facebook and Instagram, as US billionaire social media bosses Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg allowed their platforms to be used as giant megaphones to spread hate and disinformation and tear apart our communities. It doesn't have to be like this.
Writing this as my city goes into shutdown for a second night of violence, my phone is constantly pinging with WhatsApp updates. A group of literally hundreds of people has sprung into action, coordinating, donating, providing lifts for families to get somewhere safe for the night, bringing food to those who don’t want to leave the house, offering shelter, car seats, toys and arts supplies for children. Ordinary people from every background, community and colour are carrying out thousands of acts of care and repair, looking after people they do not know, and showing clearly that none of this is in their name.
In terms of leadership, communities are leaving our political representatives in the dust. Across this island, politicians must now focus on taking the hate megaphone out of the hands of haters – by demanding that social media platforms like Meta and X turn off their toxic algorithms until they can be proven to be safe.
Through my work at Act Now, an independent people-powered campaigning community in Northern Ireland, I’ve been privileged to see how people move with urgency, compassion and love in these moments. Even as the images of orchestrated violence and hate fly around the world, it is these actions of love and solidarity that will ultimately define us – to the outside world, but more importantly, to each other.
