PSNI given emergency Stormont cash to tackle anti-immigration riots

The Police Service of Northern Ireland is to get emergency Stormont funding to cope with anti-immigration riots across Northern Ireland, First Minister Michelle O’Neill has said.

Saying that a proposal for a £5 million payment will be brought quickly to the Northern Ireland Executive, Ms O’Neill said the heavily-understaffed police service was “really under pressure and really under financial strain”.

“Keeping the public safe is an absolute priority, not just for the PSNI but for us,” she said, speaking after a meeting of the British-Irish Council in Newcastle, Co Down, that included Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Northern Ireland Secretary of State Hilary Benn.

However, the First Minister and her Democratic Unionist Party counterpart, Deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly insisted that divisions over Communities Minister Gordon Lyons would not threaten the existence, or the operation of the Executive.

Ireland from the 1970s to the 1990s must have been groaning with future celebrities of the diaspora

Ballymena: Week of violent attacks on Northern Ireland’s small immigrant community ‘akin to 1930s Germany’

US multinationals will be slow to return operations to US, Ibec leader says

Mr Lyons has been heavily criticised for a social media message about the use of Larne Leisure Centre to house Roma who were forced to flee their Ballymena homes after riots erupted this week.

[ The DUP couldn’t have chosen a worse moment to get tough on immigrationOpens in new window ]

Saying that the Executive’s parties are “all on the same page”, Ms O’Neill said: “This violent racism that we have seen on our streets has to be called out for what it is. It’s absolutely wrong and it must stop.”

“What we’ve seen over the course of the last few days has been devastation and has been horrific for those people that have been targeted,” said Ms O’Neill, who said on Wednesday that Mr Lyons should resign.

“This is about women and children; this is about families. They have been at the front of racist, violent attacks and it is wrong on every level. I think the whole of the Executive is united on that front,” she went on.

Defending Mr Lyons, Ms Little-Pengelly said her DUP colleague had been “unambiguous” in trying to prevent violence, adding that the controversy about his remarks had been “a distraction throughout” Thursday “from our very clear and unified message”.

Violence for four nights in a row is “totally unacceptable”, she said, adding that Mr Lyons’s intention had been “to defuse tensions” locally due to a significant amount of rumour” that had been circulating in Larne in the hours before.

The calls for Mr Lyons’s resignation shared by Sinn Féin, Alliance and by Stormont’s only opposition party, the SDLP, hold little weight under Stormont rules, since each party controls the choice of their own ministers at the Executive table.

Rioting in Larne and Portadown was “a source of great shame for Northern Ireland”, Church of Ireland Primate and Archbishop of Armagh John McDowell said.

Portadown is in his diocese. “Hiding behind the figment of `legitimate concerns’ but in fact motivated by crude racism, groups of young men (and the shadowy and unaccountable people who control them) planned and carried out attacks on civil society and on democracy,” he said.

With Drumcree Sunday looming on July 6th, rioting in nearby Portadown over recent nights is of particular concern. A total 22 officers were injured with two arrests made there following violence on Thursday night.

The annual Orange march from Portadown to the Church of Ireland’s Church of the Ascension at Drumcree became a focus for violence, particularly in the years from 1995 to 2000, when it was prevented from going through the nationalist Garvaghy Road area en route back to Portadown.

The last Orange march allowed back to Portadown by that route was in 1997.