Emily Maitlis

The police were called instantly and a passerby saw what was going on in his car and actually attacked the attacker with his son's kind of, you know, hockey stick bat, a hurling bat.

And that was really what saved this man's life.

But as you can imagine, it has kicked off an extraordinary sense of panic and horror amongst the residents of this sort of quiet Belfast suburb.

not really understanding where this had come from and what it was about.

And at first, the rumours started circulating that the man was Somalian.

We then learned that actually he was from Sudan and he had been one of those who had escaped from the civil war in Sudan and been given this leave to remain, a five year leave to remain sentence.

What has essentially started, particularly in online forums and over X and Twitter, with the help of Musk, who is always a fueler of these flames, is a call for people to protest immigrants, protest migrants, protest illegal immigrants.

And that has been what's brought people out onto the streets.

We've seen, as you say, houses torched, a bus torched, burnt down.

There have been attacks and a sense of...

Real unrest for many of those residents living around the area and wider throughout the city of Belfast that they are not safe in their homes.

Because of the anger that this particular crime has really triggered.

As you can see, the whole issue is basically a tinderbox for the parties, particularly of the right, who want to make this about illegal immigration, even though it isn't.

From what we understand, the man was an asylum seeker.

But I think there is a danger, and many Northern Ireland politicians feel, that it is being weaponised by parties of the right now, particularly because...

Immigration as a whole in the UK, legal immigration, has gone down.

The numbers have gone down.

And there are parties of the right, particularly Reform, particularly Restore, the sort of sister party of Reform, feel that their power starts to wane when the British public don't care as much about immigration.

So, you know, the violence on the streets overnight is really a manifestation of, I think, so many things.

The infiltration of big money and political actors, not least Elon Musk, and the politicians who are trying to both respond to what happened and not feel that they are taken down a road where they are guilty.