Pogroms, paramilitarism and policing
In 1971, the British Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling used the phrase ‘an acceptable level of violence’ to describe what intensity of terror could be meted out on the population of the North / Northern Ireland that could be tolerated by the state.
55 years on from this, nothing has changed.
The North is seen and treated as a ‘rough edge’, or a place apart. A region that the most fundamental rights can be withheld or revoked at will by the state. In August 2024, following the paramilitary-backed racist violence and pogroms, we said ‘no going back’. No going back to intimidation, violence, homes burning and the forcible displacement of communities by a dominant group, a pattern of violence that this place is all too familiar with. 15,000 people took to the streets to demand action and articulate the sentiment: who lives here belongs here. Yet the same violence happened in Ballymena in 2025, and again in Belfast in 2026.
This violence is not spontaneous.
In September 2025 The Detail unearthed government files that evidence fears of a ‘permacrisis’ of racist violence. The files refer to a ‘decanted’ population, a disgraceful euphemism for communities forcibly displaced along ethnic lines, a crime against humanity - ethnic cleansing. Stormont’s executive office claimed that authorities had established ‘strategic coordination group and recovery coordination group for a “joined up” effort to improve community relations and mitigate the risk of further unrest.’ Where were they? Why did volunteers, communities and groups like Anaka Collective have to pick up the pieces? In addition to this community-led effort in the absence of a coordinated state response, End Deportations Belfast received numerous reports that police where ‘nowhere to be seen’ on the evening of Tuesday 9 June. Where were they? Why was it left to communities to evacuate people from paramilitary-backed far-right pogroms?
In June 2025, internal PSNI emails were leaked showing that PSNI officers were instructed not to intervene in racist riots unless there was a threat to life. The policing operation in place for the June 2026 pogroms followed a similar pattern to August 2024 and Ballymena 2025: facilitating the closure of arterial routes by far-right and known paramilitary members and effectively ‘standing down’ law and order if necessary.
Are non-intervention instructions now the modus operandi for dealing with paramilitary-backed racist violence?
When the North voted 71.2% in favour of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, we voted for a new beginning, a rights-based society, and peace delivered through Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR). Core elements of the Good Friday Agreement have not been delivered, including a bill of rights, a civic forum, meaningful policing reform and the disarmament and demobilisation of paramilitarism.
In 2020, a leaked security assessment estimated that loyalist paramilitary groups alone had 12,500 members, 22 years after they were supposed to have left the stage. In recent years, the North has seen paramilitary ‘show of strength’ mobilisations, and we witness the ‘hands-off’ approach by the state. The continued obfuscation and silence around the role of paramilitary groups in racist pogroms by the N. Ireland Department of Justice, the PSNI, the Secretary of State and Downing Street is a significant contributing factor in the recurrence of mass mobilisations of orchestrated racist violence.
In May 2025, one month before the Ballymena violence, End Deportations Belfast raised concerns around the policing response to the August 2024 racist violence. We had monitored arrest rates, prosecutions and most importantly, the quietly dropped cases. The Belfast Telegraph revealed that a total of only 43 files were received by the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) from the PSNI in relation to the racist violence, 27 resulting in a decision to prosecute with 8 under consideration. This is out of thousands who took part in the violence. Importantly, the very few cases investigated that were involving paramilitary connected individuals were quietly dropped or were so flawed, they were thrown out of court.
The PSNI pursued a strategy of surveillance with ‘arrests to follow’: these simply did not materialise. Furthermore, the delay in police and justice response meant that charges became so detached from the wider picture of the orchestrated paramilitary-backed racist violence, that the crimes could be portrayed as insignificant and often not worthy of taking forward.
This was in stark contrast to the response elsewhere in the UK in the wake of the August 2024 Southport attack racist riots. The policing and justice precedent set in August 2024 in Northern Ireland meant that Ballymena 2025 was inevitable. Again, a paltry number of arrests were made. By November 2025, only 91 charges followed the Ballymena violence out of thousands who took part.
When we delved into who was arrested and who faced charges in Ballymena, it becomes apparent that despite the presence of what the Chief Constable referred as ‘people historically involved in paramilitaries ‘standing there amongst the people who cause this violence’’, the PSNI did not pursue paramilitary arrests or charges. We uncovered through Freedom of Information (FOI) in January 2026 that almost 50 children involved in August 2024 and Ballymena 2025 racist violence were identified as victims of Child Criminal Exploitation (CCE). CCE is child abuse. PSNI did not follow the UK-wide procedure of using the National Referral Mechanism for CCE, and as a result, those responsible for criminally exploiting the children to commit racist pogroms were not identified or held to account. PSNI protection of paramilitary groups exploiting children is well evidenced. Racist violence carried out through CCE is a pipeline for paramilitary recruitment.
This week, in the wake of the Belfast pogroms, the Children’s Commissioner Chris Quinn revealed that children had been ‘ferried in’ or trafficked to engage in racist violence to clear paramilitary debt. Days before the Belfast pogroms, a young teenager spray painted ‘all Muslims out’ with a ‘crosshair’ target in Rathcoole. The teenager revealed that he had done so under the instruction of the proscribed Ulster Defence Association (UDA). Criminal exploitation of children as ‘clean skins’ by paramilitary groups is well documented.
Paramilitaries are not merely or present or ‘looking on’, they are manning and directing violent events. Impunity is the exemption or freedom from punishment, harm, or loss.
Policing and justice impunity precedents set in August 2024 echo throughout the violence of 2025 and 2026.
The social media page linked to inciting law-breaking events that led to violence in 2024, Official Protestant Coalition, is still operating and even posted the details of two activists assisting communities impacted by the 2026 racist violence on their page, effectively placing targets on their backs. Also still operating is the Ballymena Reaction Group who actively solicited information to coordinate attacks on ethnic minorities in Ballymena during the 2025 racist violence and pogroms. Addresses and presumed ethnicities of inhabitants were posted, with calls for ‘young soldiers to protect your towns’ and to ‘remove this scum from our streets’. This page recently posted the details of a charity worker who gave evidence in Stormont on ‘race relations’ putting her in imminent danger. These are orchestrated attacks on members of the public to shut down anti-racism and community solidarity with the intention of isolating and endangering a targeted community.
The PSNI are failing in their duties of detecting and investigating crime online from known extremists, even when they lead to intimidation, violence and threats on life. Because of the dire response to far-right organising online, there has been a proliferation of far-right groups coalescing around HMO housing intimidation, a thinly veiled form of racist intimidation; the enactment of a pogrom in slow motion. When warned about the use of HMO lists for nefarious purposes, damningly, the PSNI failed to act upon those reports. In August 2024, a UNCERD intervention citing concern ‘about reports of paramilitary groups and affiliated individuals perpetrating acts of racist violence and intimidation’ in Northern Ireland was not acted upon by those entrusted with keeping communities safe, namely the Department of Justice and the PSNI. The ongoing failure of institutions of the state to act is why the North is trapped in a vortex of paramilitary-backed racist violence and pogroms that ordinary people continue to pay the price for, and communities are left to pick up the pieces after.
