BELFAST — Northern Ireland police battled anti-migrant rioters for a second night with batons, shields and water cannons — as politicians shifted focus on how to police immigration along the U.K.’s open Irish border with the EU.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland said 12 officers were injured from petrol bombs, pavement stones and other objects hurled by militants Wednesday night. Officers deployed mobile water cannons to douse a 200-strong mob near a motorway roundabout on Belfast’s northern outskirts, where the rioters were kept from reaching a nearby hotel housing asylum seekers. Police arrested 16 rioters and issued a dossier of photos in hopes of identifying two others.
U.K. government officials said at least 27 immigrant families have been intimidated from their arson-hit homes since Monday night, when a Sudanese immigrant, 30-year-old Hadi Alodid, allegedly stabbed a local man repeatedly in the face, neck and back in the middle of a north Belfast street — a hideous incident captured on shaky smartphone footage and spread globally on social media platforms.
Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn spent Thursday morning in a media round with U.K. broadcasters — and facing recurrent questions about why Alodid was even in Belfast. He arrived in 2023 after flying into Paris, then Dublin, and traveling north by bus across the Republic of Ireland’s barrier-free border.
That open arrangement dates to Ireland’s independence from Britain in 1922, when both sides agreed to observe a Common Travel Area allowing Irish and British citizens freedom of movement, employment and access to public services across both jurisdictions.
The century-old arrangement — of particular value to the tens of thousands who live and work on both sides of the Irish border — faced severe diplomatic challenges during Britain’s EU exit and is being questioned again because of the spotlight on how easily Alodid passed through France and Ireland.
Benn said U.K. and Irish authorities have already increased cooperation in monitoring cross-border movements, and conducting spot checks on cross-border buses and trains as well as flights into Dublin from other EU countries — enforcement activity that has increased since Alodid’s arrival.
In Dublin, Taoiseach Micheál Martin cautioned that the understandable fears over Monday’s knife attack in Belfast shouldn’t spur Britain or Ireland to restrict freedom of movement for their own citizens, particularly along the meandering 310-mile (500-kilomater) border, which has more than 200 crossings, none with fixed security checkpoints.
“The key to U.K.-Irish relationships in terms of immigration is first of all engagement between the two governments,” Martin told a press conference focused on Ireland’s upcoming six-month presidency of the European Union starting July 1.
“Others may abuse the Common Travel Area. … It’s primarily a framework for citizens,” Martin said.
But Northern Ireland’s British unionist leaders — who mostly backed Brexit in hopes it would harden the border with the rest of Ireland — have seized on the knife attack to complain that, once again, that open frontier poses a danger. Democratic Unionist leader Gavin Robinson told Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the Commons: “People are tired of warm words and promises. They want to see action. The government must now demonstrate that it is prepared to defend our borders.”
Such views are met with raised eyebrows in Dublin, where refugee officials say the movement of migrants is stronger from north to south, not the other way around. The Irish government says most of the asylum-seekers it receives come from the U.K., chiefly via land border crossings from Northern Ireland.