Foreign Invaders Are Destroying Ireland... And They Are Not Brown

Good day, Aontacht readers,

And you may have already seen there is a nightmare unfolding in the North of Ireland. It’s not a new nightmare. In fact, it’s an old and familiar one, just wearing a new mask.

After a brutal attack by a Sudanese man on a local, masked men have taken to the streets of Belfast once again. They are storming homes, breaking down doors, dragging families out into the night. They are setting cars on fire, torching buses, smashing windows and circulating lists of ‘foreigner’s’ houses they wish to target.

Watch: Rioters are burning buses and other infrastructure.

A woman in a residential street near the Shankill Road watched from an upstairs window as masked men rushed her front door and broke it down. ‘There’s wee girls inside,’ someone in the crowd said to her friend. The men attacked the downstairs windows with bricks anyway. Nearby, a car was set on fire while two police officers looked on from their car as smoke billowed towards the sky, apparently concluding it was not safe to intervene. In east Belfast, masked men set bins alight and pushed them into a bus on the Newtownards Road, with explosions heard nearby. Families with young children mingled with men wearing masks, one of them hoisting his son, no older than seven, up for a better view of a destroyed house. ‘Get a duke at that,’ he said. ‘Wow,’ the boy replied. A gutted terrace house still smouldered. ‘It was a Romanian gypsy family in that one,’ said a woman watching.

Watch: Mask thugs break into ‘foreigner’ homes to set them alight.

This is happening in Ireland in 2026. And the mainstream media is calling it ‘disorder.’

the people doing this.

Let me be very clear about who is doing this. The masked men are loyalists. They are British unionists. They wrap themselves in the Union Jack, the Butcher’s Apron as we call it in Ireland, and they claim to be defending their communities. Claire Hanna, the SDLP MP for Belfast, called it what it is: ‘a race-based pogrom… men going door to door asking to “get the foreigners out” based exclusively on the colour of their skin.’ The violence is concentrated in poor Protestant areas where the banned paramilitary Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Volunteer Force are still strong, organisations with decades of experience in ethnic cleansing, tolerated by the British government for generations because they are politically convenient to have around. They know how to do this. They have done it before and now, they are doing it again.

These are not Irish people. Simply by virtue of the fact they would never be heard calling themselves ‘Irish.’ They don’t want to be. They are British and this is despite the fact they don’t even live in Britain.

And here is something the commentators discussing this ‘unprecedented’ violence seem to have entirely forgotten. This is the Shankill Road. This is the same stretch of streets where, in the 1970s, a loyalist gang known as the Shankill Butchers roamed at night abducting Catholics at random and murdering them with butcher’s knives, killing at least nineteen people in some of the most sadistic sectarian violence of the entire Troubles. Three of their victims were taken from streets within walking distance of where these riots are now unfolding. Where was the rolling news coverage then? Where was the talk of ‘shocking scenes never witnessed before in Belfast’? The violence was not new in 2026. It has simply changed the colour of its targets, and in doing so, finally become newsworthy to people who never cared before.

the targets.

Here is the sick irony. These loyalist thugs are targeting minority communities whilst asking the Irish nationalists to unite with them against anyone who isn’t white. But we Irish have a memory longer than theirs and we know that in one month, at their July bonfires, they will drape Irish flags on enormous pyres and scrawl ‘KAT’ on them. That is ‘Kill All Taigs’. ‘Taig’ being a slur for Irish Catholics.

For me. For my family. For everyone who looks like me.

They will burn our flags. They will chant for our deaths.

They will celebrate the memory of pogroms that drove Catholic families out of Belfast in 1920, when loyalists expelled 10,000 Catholic workers from the shipyards and burned thousands more out of their homes.

Sir James Craig, Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister, later told the assembled workers:

‘Do I approve of the action you boys have taken in the past? I say, yes.’

That is the history these people are upholding. And now they want Irish nationalists to join them in some kind of bastard patriotism against ‘foreigners’? The same people who will burn my flag next month want me to stand beside them today?

the collaboration, and the imported problem.

But there are traitors. The loyalist far-right and the Irish far-right are collaborating. Two factions whose ideologies are diametrically opposed, one British supremacist, one Irish supremacist, have found common ground on a shared belief in the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory. After centuries of mutual animosity, they are shaking hands over the bodies of brown people. Aris Roussinos, who has been living in Belfast, reports that the idea of Catholics and Protestants uniting against mass immigration is ‘overwhelmingly one pushed more by Loyalists than by Nationalists,’ but there have been ‘the first glimmerings of a tentative and distrustful rapprochement.’ This terrifies me. It should terrify everyone. Because the fascism that has plagued Britain since the 1930s, the organised, street-fighting, race-hate fascism, has always been kept at bay in Ireland by the simple fact that Irish nationalists lean left. We know who the enemy is. It is not the brown family down the road. It is the empire that has been trying to crush us for eight centuries. But if that left-wing tradition frays, if Irish nationalists start buying the same lies that have turned English workers against each other, then we are lost.

This nonsense is, of course, imported from Britain, just like the people perpetrating it. The loyalists themselves are descended from British settlers, planted on Irish land in the 17th century to subdue the native population. They are, quite literally, foreign invaders, whose ancestors came here to steal our land and suppress our culture, and who have spent the intervening centuries terrorising the native population. The far-right rhetoric fuelling these riots is also imported. Tommy Robinson, a convicted fraudster and professional Islamophobe, amplified the video that sparked the violence, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, shared it to his hundreds of millions of followers. After which the riots began, he then said:

A foreign-owned social media platform, run by a billionaire tech tycoon thousands of miles away, used a tragedy to whip up racial hatred, and loyalist thugs, eager for any excuse to assert their dominance, obliged.

And then there is the truly bizarre spectacle of American commentators, many of whom could not find Belfast on a map and know nothing of the conflict beyond what they have absorbed from films, framing this as some kind of ‘Irish uprising’ or nationalist awakening. It is precisely the opposite. The people doing this are the descendants of the colonists. They are not rising against anything. They are doing what their forebears have always done when their grip on dominance feels threatened, which is to terrorise whoever is nearest and most vulnerable. An American influencer cheering this on as some kind of Irish nationalist moment understands neither Ireland, nor nationalism, nor history, and should perhaps consider sitting this one out.

the resistance.

The good news, and there is good news, is that real Irish nationalists are not buying it. In Ardoyne, a working-class Catholic and nationalist area, local republicans have mobilised to protect ethnic minority families.

Damien Fennell, a republican activist, said: ‘We have reassured them that they are welcome in Ardoyne and these racist scumbags don’t represent this district.’ He added: ‘The contact details of local Republicans have been left with them and we will be mobilising at their house should anyone arrive at their door. Make no mistake, local republicans will be defending this family and any others attacked like this by any means necessary.’

That is the Ireland I know and that is the Ireland I am proud of. While loyalist thugs burn buses and smash windows, Irish nationalists are standing guard outside the homes of frightened families. We know what it is like to be burned out of your home. We know what it is like to be targeted because of who you are. And we will not let it happen to anyone else on our watch.

The part that makes my blood boil the most though is something I touched upon at the beginning of this article. And it’s that when the loyalists are done with their pogroms against brown people, they will return to their traditional hobby: pogroms against Irish Catholics. In one month, at the Eleventh Night bonfires, they will burn Irish flags, display effigies of Irish politicians, and scrawl ‘KAT’ on everything they can reach. And the British government will say nothing. The media will say nothing. The world will move on. But if an Irish republican so much as raises their voice in defence of their community, they will be labelled a terrorist.

That is the double standard. That is the Empire’s justice, and it has never once changed.

There are foreign invaders are destroying Ireland. They have been for centuries. Today they are targeting brown families. Tomorrow they will be targeting us again. But the Irish people know who we are. We know our history, all of it, including the parts that the rolling news cameras only seem to notice when the victims have changed colour. We know that solidarity is the only weapon that has ever worked against the Empire. So we will stand with the minorities. We will defend their homes. We will tell the loyalist thugs: not on our watch. Because we remember. And we will never forget.

And on that thought, I’ll let you go.

This article was originally published in The Spectacle.