Left-wing politicians and media figures on both sides of the Irish Sea are facing accusations of hypocrisy over their strident condemnation of the recent riots in Belfast after having defended political violence when the causes matched with their own, such as the decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles.
Chaotic scenes of violence and mayhem have once again broken out on the streets of Northern Ireland, this time in the wake of Monday evening’s stabbing attack, in which a Sudanese asylum seeker is alleged to have attempted to behead local man Steven Ogilvy in Belfast.
Anti-beheading protests on Tuesday quickly devolved into riots, with masked men clashing with police and setting fires to vehicles and properties throughout the city in violence that has been broadly described as anti-mass migration violence.
The head of the locally devolved government of the UK region, Northern Irish First Minister Michelle O’Neill, was quick to condemn the violence, describing firebombing attacks on residences as “disgusting cowardice” and said that the riots represented “outright thuggery”.
“The attack in North Belfast was heinous and wrong. But there are dangerous attempts to exploit that to target and attack innocent people who are simply trying to live, work and raise their families here. Racism, intimidation and violence are wrong wherever they occur. There can be no excuse and no justification for these attacks tonight,” she said.
While all this may be true, it is not as if Sinn Feinn doesn’t have its own history. Irish political commentator Rory Hanrahan in the Daily Telegraph accused the Sinn Féin politician of “mental gymnastics and hypocrisy”, given that her party previously served as the political arm of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which waged decades of terror attacks across Ireland and the United Kingdom, including bombings of pubs, school buses, shopping centres, and even Remembrance Day memorials in a failed attempt to bring the entire island of Ireland under the control of Dublin.
Hanrahan noted that despite the horrific history of The Troubles that left thousands dead, O’Neill publicly stated in 2022 that she felt there was “no alternative” to the terror waged by the IRA.
Meanwhile, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald came under criticism for failing to even address the horrific stabbing attack until Wednesday morning, when she described the attack as “depraved” and said that the “perpetrator must face the full weight of the law”.
Yet, she appeared to be far more animated in her condemnation of the rioters in Belfast, whom she accused of being “racist” and “loyalists”, while comparing them to the “pogroms” of 1969 in which Catholic neighbourhoods came under attack in Northern Ireland.
This contrasts with the tacit support she has lent to the nationalist side of the Troubles. Previously, responding to whether she thought IRA violence was justified, she said: “I believe what was justified was the right of the Irish people to stand against British Imperialism and to fight for our freedom.”
Although leftists McDonald and O’Neill are leaders in what was previously seen as Ireland’s principal nationalist political party, they have been open advocates for what many have described as a new form of colonisation of Ireland, the process of mass migration. In Irish English, new arrivals have at times been described as settlers and planters.
Indeed, as opposed to the historic “Ireland for the Irish” nationalist slogan, McDonald declared in 2022 that she supported a “New Ireland” which she described as a “home for all”. For her part, First Minister O’Neill has praised asylum seekers for adding to the “diversity of our community”.
Leftist politicians are not the only ones facing accusations of hypocrisy in the wake of the Belfast riots, with far-left outlets like the Byline Times similarly describing the violent scenes in Northern Ireland as a “racist pogrom”, which they claimed had been a result of public comments from Reform boss Nigel Farage and anti-grooming gang street organiser Tommy Robinson rather than an organic backlash to the horrific stabbing attack on Monday.
This comes in contrast to that website’s celebratory coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement, which resulted in billions of dollars in property damage and dozens of deaths during the so-called “Summer of Love” riots across the United States and Britain.
Similarly, Marxist Novaro Media commentator Ash Sakar previously celebrated the 2011 London riots following the police killing of a black man that resulted in widespread arson, looting, and the deaths of five people as having been “taut, tense, purposeful” and had shown “explosive power that can be unleashed when marginalised people see themselves reflected in each other’s struggle”.
However, following the far smaller riots in Belfast on Tuesday, Sarkar complained that the situation had gotten “out of control” and that crime was being viewed in “entirely racialised lens – but only when the perpetrators aren’t white.” Her condemnation of the riots stands in contrast to Novaro Media’s 2020 stance, which described rioting as a “political necessity” in the service of “dismantling the system”.
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