The DUP’s Gordon Lyons is not the first Irish public figure who has aligned himself with “legitimate” fears about where immigrants live, and he will not be the last. Maybe the racist wildfire spreading from Ballymena and Larne to Portadown will convince all on the left that there are no justifiable reasons for marching against hostels hotels and leisure centres that accommodate people who have come to Ireland from different parts of the world. In the 26 county bit of Ireland similar mass racist protests have been endorsed by many Sinn Féin public representatives.

In the 6 county bit of Ireland Sinn Féin have joined calls for the resignation of Stormont-Racist Minister Gordon Lyons – a welcome development. DUP leader, the supposedly moderate East Belfast MP Gavin Robinson, says Lyons will stay put – and accuses Sinn Féin Stormont ministers of bending to pressure from their political rivals the SDLP.
On the BBC NI programme “The View” panellists Claire Hanna MP (SDLP South Belfast) and journalist Allison Morris were visibly shocked giving viewers eye-witness accounts of terrified residents putting Union Jack regalia on their windows to deter racist pogromists – in the desperate hope that only people deemed not to be “locals” would be driven out of Ballymena. Hanna called this scene “dystopian” – an imagined world or society in which people lead dehumanized, fearful lives. This is a sinister historic reminder of the consolidation of Nazi racist rule in early 1930’s Germany.