Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
FAR-RIGHT GROUP SETS UP IN ULSTER
13mths 500k Generation Identity stages racist rallies
How long former EDL leader Tony Robinson has been jailed for The number of signatures on an online petition calling for his release
BRITAIN’S most active far-right group has arrived in Belfast, it has been revealed.
Generation Identity has already staged half a dozen public actions in the city since August last year.
Several far-right demonstrators were pictured at the “Free Tommy Robinson” rally in front of City Hall giving Nazi salutes – and in the crowd next to them flew the group’s distinctive black and yellow flag.
GI believe in “ethnopluralism” and “remigration”, ideas advocacy group Hope Not Hate has branded “far more extreme and race-based than anything posited by groups like the English Defence League”.
Ethnopluarlism dictates that different ethnic groups ought to live in separation from one another out of respect for their “right to difference”.
Remigration refers to the physical repatriation of any illegal immigrants to their country of origin. GI’S current crop of activists, thought to be less than 100 in the UK and Ireland but into the thousands across Europe, are drawn from a range of organisations across Britain’s far-right.
These include London’s “Traditional Britain Group” and the neo-nazi terrorist group National Action, a member of whom this week admitted plotting to kill a Labour MP and threatening to kill a police detective investigating him for child grooming.
GI is best known for its “Defend Europe” mission, through which it managed to raise thousands of euros to buy a ship to block refugee vessels carrying migrants across the Mediterranean in 2017.
A report by Hope Not Hate revealed GI already has a presence in Dublin and has conducted a series of promotions in Belfast.
In January, the group held its first “new activists meeting” followed by a full conference in March.
In March, a similar group calling themselves “Generation Sparta” carried out a racist leaflet drop in the Ravenhill area of Belfast.
The literature warned against the “Islamification” of Northern Ireland.
Belfast councillor Jolene Bunting did not respond to a request for comment on whether she has connections to GI.
However, on Thursday evening she posted a picture on her Facebook account of a GI banner flying over Westminster Bridge with the message: “Would anyone have a contact for GI Belfast?”