Secrets don’t last long in Newtownards, a market town in Northern Ireland, not even when you cloak your identity beneath a Ku Klux Klan robe and hood.
The group of at least eight men who marched through the town in KKK regalia last weekend and brandished crosses outside an Islamic prayer centre caused an outcry – and left a trail of evidence.
Several of the men took off their hoods and drank beer in one pub. In another they danced. They shouted greetings to passersby who recognised their voices. Photographs and videos – since removed – ended up on Facebook.
“Yeah, I know who they are,” said one pub owner, who declined to be named. “Grown men acting like complete eejits, how can you not?”
So the Halloween marchers who hit the headlines were hardly anonymous. And perhaps that was the point: they could parade through town in white-supremacist garb, revealing their identity while targeting a religious minority, and apparently get away with it.
“They weren’t teenagers; they were grown men. They knew what they were at,” said Kellie Armstrong of the liberal, non-sectarian Alliance party, who is Northern Ireland assembly member for the Strangford constituency.
The police are investigating the incident as a hate crime and are understood to have identified some members of the group. But the brazenness of last Saturday’s march has beamed a spotlight on anti-Muslim sentiment in Northern Ireland – and on efforts by far-right groups in England to export their brand of xenophobia across the Irish Sea.
Britain First, whose leaders were jailed in England earlier this year for religiously aggravated harassment of Muslims, has chosen Newtownards, a loyalist bastion 10 miles east of Belfast on the tip of Strangford Lough, as its bridgehead.
Members of Britian First visited the town in 2015 and filmed its Islamic prayer centre, a discreet, unmarked building previously unknown to many residents. A campaign of intimidation ensued – graffiti on the walls, a severed pig’s head left on the doorstep.
The group’s leader, Paul Golding, was at an initial Britian First meeting in Northern Ireland, in Newtownards in July. And then, last Saturday, came the KKK parade.
“Given that they stopped outside the Islamic prayer centre, it doesn’t seem like a fancy dress jape gone wrong: it was clearly intended to send a message,” Les Allamby, chief commissioner for Northern Ireland’s Human Rights Commission, said in an interview.
During the pub crawl, the KKK imitators met Tony Martin, the newly anointed leader of the National Front, who is from Croydon, and his girlfriend, Sharon Mellor. She posed with one hooded man, his tunic splattered with fake blood. She didn’t know who they were, she told the Belfast Telegraph. “I wasn’t with them: I merely posed for a picture. I haven’t hurt anyone, neither do I plan to.”
In 2015 Mellor, who lives in Newtownards, said she had tried to burn down the Islamic centre. She later said this was a joke.
Several residents said some of the KKK group were paramilitaries. “Sure who else would just waltz down Regent street like that? They’re showing who’s in charge.”
And the pub staff who served the KKK group were keeping silent. “I saw nothing, heard nothing,” said one woman. “No idea, it was my night off,” said another. “There’s the door, please leave,” said a third.
Numbers of racially motivated crimes in Northern Ireland now exceed those connected to traditional sectarian bigotry, police figures show. Between July 2016 and June 2017 there were 1,062 racist incidents reported versus 938 incidents involving traditional religious sectarianism. But despite the KKK incident there is little evidence of far-right inroads here. In Newtownards, politicians and church leaders rallied in a swift, impressive display of solidarity with their Muslim neighbours.
“The community is very much on the side of the victims,” said Peter Weir, a Democratic Unionist party assembly member. “If you’re looking to intimidate it doesn’t require a large proportion of the population.”
Allanby, of the Human Rights Commission, said the far-right was struggling to gain traction. “Groups like Britain First clearly see fertile ground here. But the main political parties here have got better at not playing the race card.”Attendees at the Britain First meeting were few, and outnumbered by counter-protestors. Its credibility perhaps still suffers from an incident in 2015 when its leaders posed in front of a “big new mosque” –which was in fact Newtownards town hall.