Pat Rabbitte

Let the two governments do what they need to do to tighten up law enforcement or whatever.

But it has nothing to do with the fact that this was a racist pogrom by an organized group driven by social media, driven from the top.

You would think that Musk had something else on his hands this week than weighing into the Belfast situation.

Yes, there is neglect in the hard loyalist areas.

There's no doubt about that.

During their decades of ascendancy, the old Unionist Party ignored them.

They didn't need them.

Then they were replaced by the DUP, and the DUP used them as marching fodder and sometimes used them for muscle.

But in terms of, yeah, you had the emergence for a brief time of the small loyalist parties that sought to represent the working class areas.

But generally speaking, the politicians of Northern Ireland haven't dealt with it.

And there are issues there to be dealt with.

But I don't think you can...

I don't think we can jump to the conclusion that racism is worsening in Ireland.

Yeah, there are concerns about immigration and that opinion poll, you know, probably accurately reflects the people think

that the immigration issue ought to be more openly discussed and all that kind of thing.

But I think that's different from saying that there is an increase in racism.

I mean, yes, we do have racism north and south of the border.

But I think it's quite limited, to be honest.

But there are issues surrounding immigration that have to be discussed.

I'm not sure, Keira, that I would agree with your equivalence between what has happened down here and what has happened in Belfast in this particular case.