The people of Belfast were shocked the night of June 8 to learn of a brutal and senseless attack on a man in the northern part of the city. Stephen Ogilvie has been left blind in one eye and with other severe injuries after a knife attack. The apparent perpetrator, Hadi Alodid, was arrested at the scene and has been detained awaiting trial.
The severity of the assault was chilling to see—and just about everyone did eventually witness it as a video of the horror captured on a mobile phone went viral—but in the hours that followed, many people focused on Mr. Alodid’s refugee status. The Police Service of Northern Ireland, hoping to preempt a wave of anti-immigrant misinformation, had informed the public that the attacker had been born in Sudan (though the first report erroneously identified the attacker as a Somali immigrant).
That approach backfired spectacularly, and rioters quickly took to the streets. They initiated running battles with police, burned out cars and buses and ultimately targeted and destroyed homes that the mob believed housed immigrants.
“The Troubles,” the often bloody conflict between Northern Ireland’s two dominant communities, ran from 1969 to 1994. It pitted nationalists (or republicans), those who supported one unified Ireland, against unionists (or the more extreme loyalists), those who wished to remain in the United Kingdom. It is still the most common lens through which conflict in Belfast is understood.
For those from outside Ireland, it can be tempting to imagine that scenes of burning homes in Belfast must relate to the ancient Catholic-Protestant, nationalist-unionist animosity that typified that period, but that framing has always risked obscuring more than it illuminated. It is especially misleading in this instance.
The June riots were explicitly directed toward migrants, such that some public figures suggest a more accurate term for what happened would be “pogrom.” While racial diversity has increased in Belfast this century, Northern Ireland remains the most ethnically homogeneous region in the United Kingdom. It has experienced considerably less demographic change than the Republic of Ireland.
The violence took place most directly in unionist and loyalist communities, often the places where more settled Belfast populations live in close quarters with migrant populations. Rev. Steve Stockman, raised in a deeply unionist tradition, was dismayed to see that “it was their own community that [rioters] were burning and hammering. It’s bizarre.” He explains that while many immigrant homes and businesses were targeted, the damage quickly engulfed all members of the community.
Breaking boundaries
Rev. Stockman is a Presbyterian minister ministering in the leafy southern part of the city, traditionally a unionist stronghold. Father Martin Magill is a Catholic priest working in the mostly nationalist West Belfast.
If the binary account of Belfast were true, it would be hard to imagine these two men crossing paths. Instead, they have become “soul friends” who have together created a unique celebration of the true diversity and creativity of the city—the 4 Corners Festival.
Talking to America on June 11, after the riots subsided, they explained they first met because Father Magill wanted to arrange Irish language lessons in Rev. Stockman’s building. The two men instantly shared a sense that each had found a deep ally in the other. Rev. Stockman recounts the impression he had upon the end of their first coffee together: “It was a very clear whisper of the Holy Spirit—something has just begun here.”
Over the course of the next months, their friendship found its feet over conversation and coffee. Both had grown increasingly frustrated with the formality and predictability that characterized ecumenical efforts in the city. Lamenting together, Rev. Stockman said, “Maybe we should start a festival.”
He remembers how Father Magill “moved forward with enthusiasm, saying, ‘Yes, yes, we should do that!’” Within four months, they had launched 4 Corners. Thirteen years later, it has grown into a permanent fixture in the city’s cultural life, encouraged by both Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV.
Its mission statement explains that 4 Corners seeks “to inspire people from across Belfast to transform it for the peace and wellbeing of all,” reaching across the geographic and cultural divides to affect every corner of the city. The group’s sponsored events have included art exhibitions, music performances, literary discussions, dance and structured dialogues.
An example of their innovative programming includes a musical poetic tour across the city, from east to west, on board Belfast’s distinctive “glider” bus system. Father Magill explains that 4 Corners is “deeply informed by our Christian faith,” expressed through a mutual commitment to the arts, as a means “to encourage the building of relationships.”
Those unfamiliar with Belfast might not realize how ambitious it is to try “getting people out of their corner,” Rev. Stockman says. He offers a helpful illustration: For those nationalists who live in Father Magill’s neighborhood in West Belfast, to cross to the east side of Belfast does not just mean entering a place of historic hostility and profound cultural difference. “It means they have to cross the ‘Albert Bridge’ or the ‘Vic’ [the Queen’s Bridge] or the ‘Elizabeth Bridge’—they are confronted with all these Royal British things that quietly communicate this city is not theirs.”
But the effort is worth it because the festival carves out space where people can experience what Francis called the “culture of encounter.” Francis taught in his encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” that people “should be passionate about meeting others, seeking points of contact, building bridges, planning a project that includes everyone” (No. 216), and Father Magill and Rev. Stockman’s initiatives do just that.
The two men emphasize that the rich diversity explored by peace-making and community-building efforts like 4 Corners are slowly but surely crafting the possibility of a socially healthier Belfast. The effort builds on groundbreaking projects like the famous Corrymeela Community, a Christian ecumenical effort, fostering the same kind of culture as Forthspring, an inter-community group that sponsors a physical space for local cultural and social interactions.
It is the nature of contemporary media that these everyday, incremental contributions to the common good are overlooked. What is often left in depictions of Belfast is a narrative rooted in drama and conflict.
Father Magill appreciates that in many Belfast neighborhoods “there are lots of different organizations and the lovely thing is that they are working away in the background, not going out looking for praise.” This is a reality experienced far more often than rioting that breaks into global headlines.
Rev. Stockman adds, “You have to do something wrong to make the news and therefore ‘the news’ is this very shallow, one-dimensional headline that is usually about divisions.”
Breaking the old narrative
A protest against racism on June 13 in support of the city’s immigrants that drew thousands to the city center, easily dwarfing a counterprotest attacking immigrants, garnered a fraction of the media attention paid to the rioters just a few days before.
And when it comes to the divisions on display this June, both men are clear that it would be “outrageous” to assess the tension through the old lens of the nationalist-unionist divide. Father Magill notes how the role of “social media generally makes this situation very different” from the riots experienced during the Troubles.
“We need to talk about people from outside who are actually influencing this,” he says, alluding to the role of British far-right politicians and polemicists who have assembled digital infrastructure for fomenting this racially motivated violence. These figures seem to have been able to tap into the cultural memory of the Troubles but direct it toward new targets.
Their message of resentment and conflict was especially potent when it was amplified by the likes of Elon Musk, prominent social media influencers and Whatsapp group chats that informally converged to spread an impression that violent unrest against all immigrants was a “reasonable” response to an assault committed by one asylum seeker.
Another distinguishing mark of the latest troubles in Belfast has been the rapid political response. In the past, political leaders in loyalist communities might have been slow to intervene, seeing street riots as a means of delivering a message to U.K. politicians.
This time, Father Magill and Rev. Stockman were heartened to see local community leaders speak in a way “that was more measured,” meant to calm passions, not stoke them.
Rev. Stockman explains that the habit of summer rioting is now so well-established that it is almost a part of the “loyalist psyche.” Now, outside forces have co-opted that machinery of loyalist street resistance.
The community’s leaders “created something that lies dormant, but now other people can trigger it,” Rev. Stockman says. Whatever the full strategic reasoning behind the intervention this time by loyalist leaders, vocal opposition to “racist thuggery” from key figures is to be welcomed, he says.
Father Magill points out that what Belfast experienced after the street assault, an attack which was broken up by a West Belfast man and a Portuguese immigrant, is “a community imploding in on [itself].” He believes the only way out of this cultural and political dead-endism is for unionist leaders to finally insist, “No, this can’t go on,” that the community needs to try “something different” rather than use street violence to have its say in Belfast life.
Although the target of the street violence was different this time, in technique and effect it so closely resembles the Troubles that, for Father Magill, “what we’re dealing with here is trauma.” He speaks of one congregant at Mass last week who was viscerally reminded of how she and her family were “burned out of their house in 1969.” Now that trauma is being inflicted on a new generation.
The address of an immigrant family in Rev. Stockman’s church was distributed on WhatsApp channels as a potential target for a mob attack. That family had to flee.
Father Magill reports that he had welcomed a primary school class into the church for Mass on June 11. The teacher, breaking down in tears, told him that a child from an immigrant family had begun the day by explaining to her that “the Irish don’t want us anymore.”
The same school reports that “quite significant numbers of newcomer children [the term used to designate children from migrant families] have not been coming to school,” and the prominent community activist Jim Deeds reported on June 10 that “there are no Muslim people on the streets” in Belfast.
While media across the world will rerun the footage of burning cars and hooded youths, it is the impact on these residents of Belfast that is the chief concern of Father Magill and Rev. Stockman. The family of the stabbing victim, Stephen Ogilvie, issued a call for peace that explicitly honored the role immigrants play in the life of the city.
The statement issued by 4 Corners strikes a similar note, declaring to immigrants: “Belfast is your city too.” And the crisis has been forging new networks of solidarity.
Rev. Stockman notes how churches are collaborating with feminist collectives to provide refuge for families burned out of their homes. For the two clergymen, the challenge now facing the city is: “What kind of community are we going to create?”
The hard work of building an answer strong enough to still the violence will continue, beyond media-driven binaries that have too often shaped depictions of Belfast.
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