In this part of the world head chopping is viewed with visceral anathema which might go some way to explaining the revulsion that is said to be saturating Belfast at the moment. Speaking to a former republican prisoner this afternoon I learned that people from the nationalist community are furious, with some talking about joining protests this evening. He will not be turning up.
Not that he is opposed to standing with others in opposition to knife crime. He is not prepared to stand against colour and demonise people of a different skin tone from himself. He made the point that knife crime is nothing new in Belfast, reminding me that the nationalist community was terrorised for years in the 1970s by the Shankill Butchers, who came as close as is imaginable to beheading some of their victims.
On the back of that exchange, in a later conversation with a former member of Sinn Fein I caustically commented that it seemed Lenny Murphy was back in Belfast stalking the streets of North Belfast. He suggested an alternative knife man - the one who butchered Robert McCartney in a Markets bar twenty one years ago.
In recent years I have attended several protests against knife crime, only one of which involved head chopping. On that occasion the person responsible was reported to be a man by the name of Robbie Lawlor who was later murdered not far from the scene of last night's incident. The people who gathered on Drogheda's West Street appalled at the murder of Keane Mulready Woods genuinely opposed the killing. They were not on the street because they did not like the skin colour of the killer.
The person arrested on suspicion of last night's attack is reported by the PSNI to be a Sudanese national. That has kickstarted a surge in anti-immigrant rhetoric from quarters which were much less vociferous when Ian Ogle was knifed to death in Belfast in 2019. Ogle's killers, because they identified as white and British, did not provoke the same rabid outcry that we are familiar with when the attacker is a different colour. The Irish News has reported that 'far-right activist Tommy Robinson and tech billionaire Elon Musk amplified calls for people to take to the streets in response to the incident.'
We can therefore expect the type of hatred that flowed onto the streets in Ballymena last year. We can also expect that amongst those who will block the roads to oppose colour rather than crime will be some who gathered at Scarva at the weekend in support of genocide in Gaza. Brutal murder is not something that taxes them too much. Rather than call for last night's attacker to be executed they could demand he be conscripted into the IDF - ready made, no training necessary.
Last night's attack was brutal and savage. There is no mitigation. Whatever about immigration policy, its rights and wrongs, people's concerns and fears, the policy is hardly any more responsible for last night's savagery than it is for the savagery that ended Ian Ogle's life.
As the writer Louth For Ever commented on Bluesky:
fascists exploiting a crime are not protesters with concerns . . . They are the organised far right, and the failure to say so plainly is the failure that lets them launder street violence into legitimate grievance.
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