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Lessons from Belfast and from a week that should have shocked us — but didn’t.
Lesson 1: Import the culture, import the consequences.
There is a sentence that no politician in these islands will utter, so I will: if you bring into your society large numbers of people from countries where beheadings are not unusual, you will get more beheadings.
This is not a controversial sociological proposition. It is simple logic. Culture travels with people. It always has. The Irish who emigrated to Boston and Birmingham brought their religion, their clannishness, their work ethic, their drinking habits, and their political loyalties with them. Nobody found that surprising.
What is peculiar about the present moment is the insistence that this self-evident truth applies to every migrant group in history except the ones currently arriving in Western Europe.
Female genital mutilation, honour violence, and the sexual predation of women who dress and move freely — these are not random pathologies. They have origins. Pretending otherwise does not make anyone safer. It merely makes our commentariat feel better about themselves.
Lesson 2: The camera doesn’t lie.
It matters enormously, in the Ireland and Britain of 2025, whether a crime is filmed or not. The attack on Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast received wall-to-wall coverage — understandably so. It was graphic, it was public, and it was on camera.
But consider, by contrast, the murder last week in Galway of Masuma Sohrabi, a young Iranian mother of two. She too was almost beheaded. She received a fraction of the coverage. Why? Because her death did not fit the required narrative. The perpetrator was not a far-right native. The victim was not useful. And live footage didn’t exist to trigger an avalanche of public attention.
In a media culture that has ceased to distinguish between journalism and activism, the news value of a crime is increasingly determined not by its severity but by its political convenience. Ogilvie’s attack could be marshalled into a story about dangerous nativism and riots. Sohrabi’s murder could not. So one was amplified and one was buried. This is not reporting. It is curation.
Lesson 3: Reality does not care about ideology.
A man carried out the attack in Belfast. A woman filmed it. It took men to stop it. I state these facts not to provoke, but because the ideology that now governs our public discourse insists that such facts are either irrelevant or impermissible. They are neither.
Sex differences in physical aggression are among the most robustly documented findings in social science. This does not mean every man is dangerous or every woman is passive. It means that when societies import large numbers of young, unattached males from high-violence cultures, they are not importing a random demographic cross-section. They are importing the cohort statistically most associated with violent disorder.
Pretending this is not so, in the name of equality, is not progressive. It is negligent.
Lesson 4: The authorities’ priority is not your safety. It is their reputation.
Unable to prevent crimes before they happen, the focus of the authorities rapidly shifts to managing the narrative afterwards. This was made depressingly clear at the hastily convened press conference at Stormont, where PSNI chief constable Jon Boutcher’s primary concern appeared to be not the events that had just occurred, but the events that might follow — specifically, the threat of public disorder from people who were angry about the original attack.
The sequence of official priorities was revealing: first, reassure the public that everything is under control; second, warn against any response that might embarrass the authorities; third, if time permits, address the underlying problem. The underlying problem, naturally, was not addressed.
Lesson 5: The first casualty is language.
Michelle O’Neill, First Minister of Northern Ireland, stood before cameras and stated, with apparent conviction, that Northern Ireland was not operating an open-borders immigration system. This claim is not merely questionable. It is laughable.
Northern Ireland shares a land border with the Republic of Ireland across which there are no immigration controls whatsoever. The Republic, in turn, operates as a de facto open door to the European Union’s free movement zone. Anyone who reaches Dublin, legally or otherwise, can reach Belfast.
To claim this does not constitute open borders requires either an impressive command of euphemism or a total detachment from geography. Our politicians have long since decided that the electorate cannot be trusted with the honest truth about immigration. So, they do not provide it.
Lesson 6: There are two Irelands.
On the day after the Belfast stabbing, the story led the web editions of The Times and The Daily Telegraph in London. It did not lead at the Irish Times or the Irish Independent in Dublin. This was not an accident, and it was not a coincidence. It was an editorial choice reflecting a values system in which certain stories are deemed too dangerous for certain audiences — not because they are untrue, but because they might produce the wrong emotional response in the wrong readers.
The Irish media establishment has, over the past decade, constructed a remarkably coherent ideological consensus on immigration, multiculturalism, and national identity. Stories that do not fit that consensus are not suppressed exactly — they are managed. They appear lower down the page. They receive less prominent photography. Their perpetrators are described in more opaque language.
We live in a land of carefully curated news. That’s precisely why they want to curtail social media.
Lesson 7: Tuesday’s protests had a strong astroturf feel to them.
Political astroturf (or artificial grass) refers to campaigns that artificially manufacture the illusion of widespread, organic grassroots support for a political agenda when it is actually steered and controlled by hidden forces.
Tuesday evening’s protests and violence in Belfast had, to my eye, a distinctly manufactured feel. The demographic out on the streets was skewed extraordinarily heavily towards young, masked males. The targets — public vehicles, buildings housing non-nationals — might have been selected in advance. It is noteworthy that a murderous attack that took place in a nationalist area seemed to provoke a violent response only in loyalist areas.
I am not saying these events were orchestrated by a hidden hand — I have no evidence for that. But the whole operation had the feel of something scripted: Bombay Street 1969, updated for the smartphone era. Just as last weekend’s march past Scarva had an uncomfortable echo of Burntollet about it.
Lesson 8: We have been here before, and it did not end well.
Whether one supports the current scale of immigration or not — and I do not — there is one thing that history renders indisputable: allowing neglected ethnic enclaves to develop, in which the residents feel alienated from the host society and the host society feels no obligation towards the residents, is a recipe for disaster.
France has spent fifty years building exactly this kind of social geography and is currently reaping the consequences in the form of periodic urban insurrection. Northern Ireland spent fifty years building something similar along sectarian rather than ethnic lines, and we all know what that produced. The answer to dangerous ghettoisation is not to pretend the ghettos don’t exist. It is to not build them in the first place.
Our political elite is making a fatal choice by allowing vast numbers of immigrants into the country but failing to do the political work to ensure proper integration. It needs to reverse those priorities and emphasise integration while sharply constraining and, indeed, reversing the number of immigrants.
Lesson 9: We should leave the European Convention on Human Rights.
Ireland should exit the European Convention on Human Rights. Our own constitution is more than adequate to protect the rights of citizens and residents. We do not need European supervision, lectures, or instructions in this area — least of all from a court that has become an obstacle to the ability of democratically elected governments to manage their own borders.
The Rwanda deportation saga in the UK provided the illustration in real time: a British government with a parliamentary majority and an explicit electoral mandate found itself grounded — literally, in the case of a deportation flight halted by a Strasbourg injunction hours before take-off — not by its own courts or its own constitution, but by a convention written in 1950 to prevent a recurrence of Nazi Germany. If that is what ECHR protection looks like in practice, Ireland should want no part of it.
The ECHR has evolved, through judicial creativity rather than democratic mandate, into an instrument that systematically privileges the rights of those who arrive over the rights of those who are already here. This is not what its founders intended, and it is not what our citizens voted for. We can protect human rights perfectly well by ourselves, thank you.
Lesson 10: The political system is running on borrowed time.
A revolt is simmering. The recent fuel price protests were a symptom of something deeper — a growing public sense that the political system is no longer responsive to the people it purports to represent. The late Peter Mair, arguably Ireland’s most penetrating political scientist, identified the mechanism years ago.
Political parties, Mair observed, have become agencies that govern rather than represent. Citizens are transformed from participants into spectators while elites accumulate ever more space to pursue their own interests. Decisions migrate from elected politicians to regulatory agencies, expert bodies, and supranational institutions — all of them operating at a comfortable distance from electoral accountability.
This process has been underway for decades. But there comes a point, in every democracy, where the gap between what the public wants and what it gets becomes too wide to paper over the cracks with press conferences and well-meaning NGO reports.
We may be approaching that point.
Lesson 11: The constitution needs to revisit treason
The Taoiseach wants to amend the constitution to allow for more ministers. While we are opening that particular document, we might consider revisiting Article 39, which currently limits treason to acts of war against the state or violent conspiracies to overthrow it.
Acts of subversion conducted from within government — the quiet, incremental betrayal of clear democratic mandates — are not covered. This matters because in 2004, the Irish people voted in a citizenship referendum with a clarity that was almost startling: 79 per cent backed a more restrictive approach to citizenship and, by unmistakable implication, to immigration more broadly.
Since 2017, successive governments have moved in precisely the opposite direction — opening the doors steadily wider, normalising mass migration, and treating anyone who objects as a figure of moral suspicion. The people said one thing. The government did another. At some point, that stops being policy disagreement and starts being something else. We need a word for it.
Lesson 12. When it’s right-wing violence, it leads.
Unlike the murder which triggered them, last night’s disturbances and fires in Belfast did lead both The Irish Times and The Irish Independent websites the next day.
It was also the lead story on RTÉ’s website. If it’s right-wing violence it leads. We don’t want people to worry about Africans coming into Ireland. So when a gruesome murder attempt leads across Europe, it doesn’t lead in Ireland. But we do want people to worry about right-wing men already here. So vandalism and property damage carried out last night does lead.
Our legacy media exists in a carefully curated space not unlike what used to operate in East Germany and in the Soviet Union. On the surface reporters report. News gets covered. But certain stories get highlighted. And other stories get downplayed. Political values dominate news values in reporting.
It is telling that it was the British paper much despised by polite Irish society, The Daily Mail [declaration of interest: I used to write a column for their Irish edition], which went and secured an interview with the man who intervened with his hurl to end the attack on Stephen Ogilvie. Why weren’t The Irish Times of The Irish Independent first off the mark to interview Matt McKiernan? Because they’re more viewspapers than newspapers.
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