Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland are rejecting pleas from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to help them stop anti-mass migration protests and riots, as demonstrations prompted by the murder of several young girls by a migration-background teenager continue in Southport, England.
“We didn’t start this, we aren’t behind it, and we aren’t about to take ownership of it,” said a senior source in the loyalist paramilitaries—militia-like organizations, mostly Protestant, loyal to the United Kingdom and opposed a merger between Northern Ireland, or Ulster, and the Republic of Ireland.
“Most loyalists have taken the approach of politely informing the PSNI that this is a policing issue and they’ve no intention of getting involved,” they explained.
The Belfast Telegraph reports it is not unusual for PSNI to meet with paramilitaries, including the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), which fought Irish national groups like the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which are mostly Catholic, for decades.
Officially, the UDA and UVF are proscribed as terrorist organizations.
Some protests in Northern Ireland have seen Irish Catholic nationalists and Ulster Protestant loyalists marching side by side against mass migration, an extremely rare display of unity.
Breakaway members of the UDA are believed to be involved in the protests, some resulting in clashes with police, who have been suppressing rioters with rubber bullets.
Protestors across the United Kingdom accuse Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer of presiding over two-tier policing, with mostly white anti-immigration protestors confronted aggressively while armed Muslim counter-demonstrators are appeased.
show lessPeople are so tired of the years and years of record-breaking mass migration to the United Kingdom, despite every government they’ve elected promising they would cut it, that Irish nationalists and Ulster loyalists are marching against it *together* in Northern Ireland. Wild. pic.twitter.com/R9VKBadK02
— Jack Montgomery (@JackBMontgomery) August 3, 2024