An overview of racist attacks and convictions over the last six months in Northern Ireland.

According to the most recent statistics produced by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), there are two racist incidents reported, and more than one incident recorded as a racist hate crime in the north of Ireland every day. In the last year, there were a total of 750 racist incidents and 470 hate crimes reported to the PSNI – an increase when compared to the 2011/12 period, as documented by the 2013 Northern Ireland Peace and Monitoring Report.

Despite the era of a ‘shared future’ and the dawn of a ‘new’ Northern Ireland since the peace agreement(s), the most high-profile attacks that have made the news in the last six months give us a glimpse into the everyday reality of abuse, harassment, and intimidation which BME communities in the north of Ireland experience.

The vast majority of the racist attacks which have become headline news have taken place in the middle of the night at the homes of foreign nationals, usually from Africa or Eastern Europe – where attackers daub racist graffiti onto the property, ahead of smashing doors and windows before fleeing. In one case, a number of Lithuanians in Dungannon experienced several attacks at their home, including the daubing of a Nazi symbol on their property accompanied by a written order to ‘get out’, in a prolonged campaign of harassment. In another incident, which bore striking resemblance to an attack months earlier in the same area, the home of a Zimbabwean family in East Belfast – who had already left another property in Belfast due to racism – was daubed with ‘No Blacks’ before they had even moved into the property.

In November 2013, Belfast City Council launched a billboard and online campaign, entitled ‘Don’t Turn Your Back On Hate Crime’, in response to recent PSNI statistics that hate crime incidents in Belfast had swelled almost 90 per cent compared with the previous year. With the exception of sectarian hate incidents, racism in Belfast has become the most prevalent hate crime – and the rise of 86.9 per cent between April and November 2013 in comparison with the same period in 2012 has surpassed the 36.3 per cent rise in sectarian incidents in the last 12 months. The number of race-hate incidents in the Belfast area alone is now higher than it was a decade ago for the entire province of Northern Ireland; with 215 reported incidents of race-hate between April and November 2013 in Belfast compared to 212 reported incidents of race-hate between April and December 2003 in all of Northern Ireland.

Could it be possible, as the PSNI argues, that the dramatic increase in racially aggravated crimes represents an increased willingness to report them? Certainly, the PSNI has been working with a range of public, community and voluntary organisations to encourage victims of hate crime to report their experience to police.

But whilst such moves by the PSNI are to be welcomed, a staggering amount (about 80 per cent) of racially aggravated crime continues to go unreported. There are a number of reasons for this – ranging from a lack of confidence by victims in the policing and justice system (as was documented in a 2006 report published by the Institute of Conflict Research entitled Policing, Accountability, and the Black and Minority Ethnic Communities in Northern Ireland), a failure on the part of the criminal justice agencies to properly identify victims of racially aggravated crimes (as was documented in a 2013 report conducted by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission entitled Racist Hate Crime: human rights and the criminal justice system in Northern Ireland), to a fear of reprisals.

As has been previously acknowledged, the fear of reprisals in the north of Ireland is often linked to paramilitary elements. While racism is not the exclusive expression of one section of the community, there is a high correlation between racist attacks and areas which are staunchly Loyalist and a traditional heartland for affiliation to prominent Loyalist paramilitary groups such as the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA). As Bill Rolston has stated, ‘It is not far-fetched to say that nothing happens in this small cluster of streets without these groups knowing, or even more, authorising it’. This sentiment has also been expressed by the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC), the PSNI, and the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee which has to date acknowledged the significant synergy that appears to exist between Loyalist paramilitary groups such as the UVF and the UDA, and racist violence which targets ethnic minorities.

A selection of these attacks and convictions are presented below: