A few hours after The Irish Times described the killing of Henry Nowak as “a rallying cry for the far right,” a Sudanese man was arrested in Belfast for an alleged attempted beheading. Footage of the incident appears to show the attacker sawing at the victim’s neck before bystanders intervene, using a hurl to subdue him. As Gavin Robinson noted, “It was medieval. It was the systematic mutilation of a human being on the streets of Belfast.”
While the Irish Left denies the link between migration and crime, in the absence of domestic data figures from other European jurisdictions, including the North of Ireland, point to a strong correlation between the two. What has been striking about the recent string of attacks across our island is how “foreign” they feel. Not just insofar as the perpetrators came from migrant backgrounds, but that the type of crime itself feels foreign. Is immigration not only increasing certain categories of crime, but changing the character of crime in Ireland itself?
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