Debate contribution: Sectarian and Racist Intimidation

Debate contribution by Mr Danny Donnelly on 16 September 2025.

MLA

Mr Danny Donnelly

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

16 September 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Sectarian and Racist Intimidation

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5111912

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. First they came for the migrants, and I did not speak out, because I was not a migrant. Members may be aware of the famous poem 'First They Came' by Martin Niemöller. Although I changed the group, the point stands. Niemöller was a prominent Lutheran pastor in Germany who originally sympathised with right-wing movements but later became a fierce critic of Nazi interference in the Protestant Church, spending years in prisons and concentration camps for his acts of resistance. His warning was clear: when prejudice and persecution go unchallenged, they spread. What begins as attacks on one group rarely ends there. The circle will always widen until you are no longer outside it. People are being fed lies, and their frustrations are being preyed on by those who are seeking to further their own agendas. It is not migrants who decide the number of homes that are built. It is not asylum seekers who set your wages. It is not the families who are newly arriving here who choose whether hospitals get funding. Northern Ireland has been underfunded for years. We live in the shadow of our past, with an unstable stop-start Government, and that has a real and lasting impact on our lives and on the quality of living here. Instead of focusing on the need to reform our institutions so that they actually work for the people of this country, people are being told to turn on each other while those who are truly responsible watch it happen. There are clearly those who want you to believe that all the problems in your life lie at the feet of migrants, but they are just the current scapegoat. Do we really think that it will stop with migrants? I have seen racist violence with my own eyes. I was in Larne leisure centre on the night in June when it was attacked and burned by a racist mob. Those who attacked the police with bricks, burned part of my community and threatened the lives of those inside the leisure centre were not satisfied with the destruction that they had caused and went hunting for foreigners who were housed in the town. Thankfully, they were not successful, largely due to the actions of the police. Those events were a disaster for the town, and it is a miracle that there was no loss of life. Those people do not represent the vast majority of people in the town who have contacted me in their droves, disgusted by what happened. The reputation of our town took a real hit. I will take a minute to commend those council staff who were in Larne leisure centre that night who stayed to the very end to ensure that everybody who was there was safe. That included very young children, who were escorted out of the building under fire from bricks, mortar and whatever else. I am sick of hearing the same vicious rhetoric about foreigners taking homes or jobs or being a threat to our families. People say that foreigners are taking social housing from those who are most in need, yet a family in my constituency was forced out of a home that they owned and into social housing because of racist attacks. People say that they are taking our jobs, yet our health service, which is already on its knees, would collapse overnight without the migrants in our workforce. Many workers in the health service and elsewhere across Northern Ireland, along with their families, are now living in fear in our constituencies. That is unacceptable. People talk about protecting families and keeping women and children safe, yet Northern Ireland is the most dangerous place in Europe in which to be a woman. Almost all the 28 women who have been killed here since 2020 were killed by a man whom they knew. You do not commit crimes or cause harm because of the colour of your skin. Those who choose to call this country their home are ordinary people like you and me. They are like the friend's daughter who moved to Australia, the son working in America, the cousin in Canada, the uncle in England or the neighbour who retired to Spain. They are all immigrants too. Let us be honest with ourselves. It is not foreigners who are pushing families into hardship but underinvestment in public services, housing shortages and low wages. It is not migrants who make women unsafe but abusers and a system that has, historically, looked the other way. It is not immigrants who burn leisure centres but people who believe lies and prey on others' frustrations in order to spread their own agenda. People who come to live and work here should be able to do so in safety and without any threat. I hope that we do not allow history to repeat itself. If we do, when they come for you or me, there will be no one left to speak for us.

834 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 13:16 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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