AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Belfast in the North of Ireland.

On Saturday, 20,000 people gathered outside Belfast City Hall for a rally organized by United Against Racism. The solidarity protest, which was supported by local trade unions, followed several days of violence in Northern Ireland in which masked rioters set fire to houses and cars, targeting immigrants and ethnic minorities. In one incident, four masked men reportedly chased a nurse into the Ulster Hospital. In another, two Ugandan health workers were barricaded in their home for four hours as neighboring properties burned and rioters threw stones at their windows. Emergency services told them it was too dangerous to try and leave. Their pastor eventually managed to negotiate their exit. This is Belfast resident Greg Sachno, who attended the “Together Against Hate” demonstration here in Belfast.

GREG SACHNO: It’s wrong, it’s racism, and it’s not what this city is. So, everybody here today is united in support of our migrant and new arrivals. We’re here showing solidarity. This is what this city is about. And I say to those racists: You’re not welcome. This isn’t your city. This belongs to everybody.

AMY GOODMAN: The disorder began more than a week ago, after an asylum seeker from Sudan was charged with attempted murder in a stabbing attack. As video of the attack circulated online, calls for protests against immigration followed. But the family of the victim, Stephen Ogilvie, who lost his eye in the attack, urged against violence. They wrote in a statement, quote, “We are aware of the tensions and talk of the protests following this incident. We want to make it absolutely clear that overnight unrest is not welcome. … We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility,” they said.

Less than 24 hours after the attack, hundreds joined protests, some becoming violent. Police in Belfast deployed water cannons to quell the rioters. At least 23 people were arrested, 12 police officers injured.

For more, we’re joined here in studio in Belfast by the filmmaker Seán Murray. He’s reported on the rise of the Irish far right, has done a two-part series. This week, he is premiering his latest film, Journacide: The War on Truth, at Docs Ireland. We talked about that in Part 1. In Part 2 of this discussion, Seán, talk about the rise of the Irish far right. Who is behind these protests, where cars and buildings are being burned?

SEÁN MURRAY: Well, to get an understanding of the Irish far right, you have to give a bit of context to how this ground is very fertile for these types of people. We live — there’s a small extremist minority here that we’ve always lived with. It’s a white supremacist, British colonial mindset. So, it is fertile ground for these type of actions to happen here. It’s not too difficult for these things to happen. Who it’s being funded with — you know, by, we would say, for sure, that there’s money coming from Israel through the likes of Tommy Robinson in England. We know that for sure. There are names in the South of Ireland, in particular.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain, when you say Tommy Robinson, for a global audience, who he is. Isn’t he — wasn’t he retweeted by Elon Musk himself?

SEÁN MURRAY: Well, not only was he retweeted by Elon Musk, Elon Musk has said that he will pay for his legal fees in any of the cases that Tommy Robinson, who is a convicted criminal on many occasions — 

AMY GOODMAN: Who is he?

SEÁN MURRAY: He would be the leader of the far right. And he’s very, very closely connected to Israel. He’s been funded by Israeli bodies to upset the status quo in the U.K., and that is now spreading to Ireland.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what has happened in the last week, and also this massive demonstration — you were a part of it on Saturday — at least 20,000 people saying this is the real Belfast.

SEÁN MURRAY: Yeah, well, I mean, we’ve had a number of days of violence around Belfast, and I have to say that it was confined to a small, small area, small pockets around Belfast, and some of the areas were extremist areas where you expect this type of thing from an extremist mindset. So, there was violence, and it was in the aftermath of the stabbing of a man in North Belfast by a Sudanese national. Now, we’re still cloudy about what had happened, but the images were quite graphic. And it has caused — these types of voids, when they’re filled, the far right tend to jump on right away. And as soon as I’d seen the images myself, I knew that we’d have a problem. And after that, we had four or five days of rallying. But the protest of the weekend, this Saturday, we were 20,000 people, has been the biggest protest in many, many years.

AMY GOODMAN: Your two-part series is Ireland’s Far-Right: Britain’s Latest Export. What do you mean?

SEÁN MURRAY: The reason why I coined the phrase “Britain’s latest export” is, we are in a postcolonial society. We have never had that. It’s kind of an oxymoron — sorry — to hear the words “Irish far right.” We’ve never had that problem before. Because we’re kind of a postcolonial society, we understand racism. That’s why we have so much solidarity with the Palestinians. Historically, we’ve always been against racism. We’ve been a victim of racism ourselves, particularly British colonial racism. So, it’s something of an oxymoron to see this type of thing growing. But, of course, for this type of cancer to feed, it needs people who are uneducated and aren’t too politically nuanced, and it just feeds off that, you know.

AMY GOODMAN: You made a film, Seán Murray, about a network of loyalists active in the North of Ireland in the 1970s said to be responsible for 120 murders. The group included active members of the British security services. This is a clip from your film. It’s the trailer, Unquiet Graves.

DOUGLASS CASSEL: There were a significant number of British intelligence agents from within the RUC and the UDR who were involved directly in these killings.

STEVE MORRIS: Well, it’s incomprehensible to me that the RUC, to quite a senior level, were aware that a bombing was being carried out. Knowing who was responsible, they still did nothing about it. For me, that is the biggest question that needs to be answered.

PAUL O’CONNOR: In summing up and in sentencing these police officers, the lord chief justice went so far as to excuse their behavior by saying — and I quote — “They were trying to rid the land of pestilence.” That was the kind of language that Nazis used about Jews.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from the trailer of Unquiet Graves, directed by our guest today, Seán Murray. Seán, tell us about this film. Tell us about the Unquiet Graves. And what is this that the judge is saying about pestilence?

SEÁN MURRAY: Yeah, well, I think the indictment that, you know, Unquiet Graves gives against the British state is that not only — the British state would like to say that there were a few bad apples, when many of the Catholic civilians were killed during the recent conflict here. And what Unquiet Graves —

AMY GOODMAN: You mean the 30-year conflict.

SEÁN MURRAY: Over the 30-year conflict.

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah.

SEÁN MURRAY: And what Unquiet Graves does is it debunks that myth, that it wasn’t just a few bad apples. This was state-institutionalized murder against the Catholic minority here in the North of Ireland. And that included judges. That included active policemen, who carried out murders while they were in uniform. And that included British soldiers, along with the loyalist death squads that were armed and financed by the British government.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain who the loyalists are, for a global audience.

SEÁN MURRAY: The British loyalist death squads — you were just talking about the far right here — in many similar ways, are of the same mindset. So, their extremist mindset is they’re very anti-Catholic, and their core campaign was to basically target the Catholic community in indiscriminate killings to put fear into Irish nationalists in the North of Ireland.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about your own family, Seán. Yesterday, you took us on a tour of the area of West Belfast, where you live. You live right behind the mural of Bobby Sands. And also, in this Part 2 of the conversation, talk more about the significance of who Bobby Sands was and what he did.

SEÁN MURRAY: Yeah, well, Bobby Sands was also from West Belfast, where I’m from myself. His mural is just right at the bottom of my street. My own family, I’m from an Irish republican family. All male members of my family were political prisoners. Four extended members of my family were killed by the British state during the conflict. So, my whole body politic has been shaped by the conflict. That’s why most of my work pertains to the recent conflict, and it’s about — mostly about historical redress for victims and survivors of the conflict, and how we can hold the state to account, where it should have been held to account during the conflict. But, of course, when we see judges making statements about ridding the land of pestilence, there wasn’t much chance of that then.

AMY GOODMAN: So, is there — I want to go yesterday to when we walked around together in the area of Clonard, where you’re from, Seán. You showed us the separation wall between the Catholic republican community, Falls Road, and the unionist Protestant area of Shankill. This is just one of the separation barriers built across the North of Ireland during what’s called the Troubles that remains in place. Many of these barriers, amazingly, for a global audience who may not know, still remain today, so many years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. You made a short film about this area called The Wall. This is a clip.

SEÁN MURRAY: This is a short film about a wall. More importantly, it’s about the people who live on either side of that wall. It’s also a film about a girl who lived on both sides, a girl whose life dispels many stereotypes around our own identity and how we are perceived by the other. In many ways, her story has enriched much of what I know about the past, and, more importantly, the futility of the hurt and trauma that’s been caused between both communities. Almost 100 years since the partition of Ireland and 50 years since the breakout of the conflict in 1969, I explore how far we have come as a society, and ask, “Will we ever see our walls coming down?”

My granny Margaret was born on the Shankill Road in 1908, 13 years before the Northern state was created with the partitioning of Ireland, leading to almost a century of conflict. Her own father, my distant grandfather, was a member of the British Army and the Orange Order. For a boy like me growing up in the '80s, the Shankill was only a street away, but may as well have been another world away. The tightly knit streets, not unlike my own, could only be viewed through the barbed wire and steel-protected fences of our neighbors' upstairs houses that straddled the peace line. The people were alien to me, and the separation wall that lined the bottom of my street, it was said, was a necessary protection from the mobs that will once again attempt to burn our houses to the ground.

Fifty years after the events of 1969, what does identity mean to a younger generation? What does the wall mean? And will we ever see the demolition of the most physical barrier to peace? Many of these questions have been asked by youth workers from Clonard Youth Club, an organization that brings people together from the Falls and Shankill Roads. It’s an inspiring project that would have been inconceivable during my younger days, and to see the kids so comfortable together does suggest major strides have been made since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. However, having grown up in an interface area all my life, it becomes second nature to welcome any progress with a certain level of caution.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from The Wall. It’s just a 12-minute piece, but it says so much. Talk about The Wall.

SEÁN MURRAY: Yeah, well, The Wall is basically a story about my family coming from both sides of the wall, one of British Protestant heritage and the other from a Catholic Irish nationalist heritage. My great-grandmother was of British heritage, and my great-grandfather. They met. She converted to Catholicism. And the story took —

AMY GOODMAN: They met at the mill.

SEÁN MURRAY: They met working in the —

AMY GOODMAN: And we could see it.

SEÁN MURRAY: Yeah, we were there at the mill, yeah. It’s an old linen mill, where a lot of workers during that period. There were a lot of linen mills around Belfast. So, that’s where they met. And the journey took quite a story from there, you know. So, she was kind of ostracized from her family for converting to Catholicism. Their family never wanted to see her children. And she lived barely three streets away and didn’t see much of her family thereafter, you know, because the wall — the wall just grew from then, you know.

AMY GOODMAN: Your father was in prison?

SEÁN MURRAY: That’s correct. My father was a political prisoner. He was in jail all during my childhood, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about who raised you.

SEÁN MURRAY: So, when I was — when I was younger, I would have been raised by my grandfather and my godfather, which is a — was a — we called him Uncle Dan. He was a close cousin of my father’s. He would have looked after me as a kid, along with my grandfather. My father was released when I was 11 years old.

AMY GOODMAN: How many years did he spend in prison?

SEÁN MURRAY: He spent nearly eight years in jail.

AMY GOODMAN: Was he at Maze?

SEÁN MURRAY: He was at Maze, yeah. He was first of Crumlin Road, Armagh, and then at the Maze Prison. We called it Long Kesh. The Maze is a British term for Long Kesh. Like everything, there’s always two words for different things here. But the irony was, when my father was released from jail, Dan himself was killed in Gibraltar with two IRA volunteers. They were killed by the British SAS, shot dead in Gibraltar. They were executed.

AMY GOODMAN: The man who helped to raise you.

SEÁN MURRAY: That’s correct, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you investigate that in Malta?

SEÁN MURRAY: Well, a lot of my work stems from then, because there was a documentary called Death on the Rock, which is available on YouTube. It’s a free documentary. And it was a — it lit a flame in me, because it was the first time that I’d seen proper investigative journalism. It was a British journalist called Roger Bolton. And that documentary lit a flame to show me that there were actually alternatives to the manipulation that we had seen and the marginalization that we had seen within our own communities. And the documentary was a powerful tool in combating the disinformation and misinformation around a lot of the killings that had happened in the North of Ireland.

AMY GOODMAN: There’s a picture that you showed us of you and Gerry Adams. You’re a kid.

SEÁN MURRAY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You’re tiny. What was that moment, when he tried to protect you?

SEÁN MURRAY: Well, during that period would have been one of the most volatile periods of the conflict. It was March 1988. So, the three bodies were brought home from Gibraltar. And for the first time, the British paramilitary police, the RUC, were kept away from the funerals. They had agreed to stay away in negotiations with the Catholic Church. There was a kind of a very eerie feeling that the British police — because right up to that, they were attacking funerals because the coffins were carrying the Irish tricolor, the Irish flag, on the coffins.

So, that day, once the coffins were going down — this was in the graveyard — a gunman attacked the funeral with grenades and killed three people, just behind where I was standing, right where the graves were then. There’s a number of photos of Gerry Adams pulling me to the ground on that occasion. After that, in the death of one of the people that were killed there, his funeral, the crowd thought there was going to be an attempted attack on his, and two British undercover soldiers were killed at that. So, it was a pretty volatile two weeks in March 1988.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see what’s happening today as a continuation, when we talk about the far right, the burnings of the buildings, of the cars? Very interestingly, UNISON, the union, massive union in Britain, 200,000 people, 50,000 here in the North of Ireland, organized to help immigrants who were terrorized, many immigrants recruited here to work in hospitals and healthcare and homecare. Do you see this as the beginning of an upsurge, or do you think it has been quelled for now?

SEÁN MURRAY: Well, we have to understand what is happening with the far right here. It’s two things. First of all, it’s to spread Islamophobia, because they want people in the West to hate Muslims. That’s primarily what this is all about, because a lot of the money comes from Zionist organizations.

And secondly, it’s about — in general, which I see very, very purposefully here in Ireland, it’s about splitting the left. The Guardian, a British newspaper, on Sky News, after an investigation, realized that most of the attacks against parties in the South was against Sinn Féin, who weren’t even in government. They’re the opposition party. So, instead of attacking the two parties, the two main parties in the South, there was a massive campaign, and they traced that campaign to America. So, a lot of these — this online presence that we were seeing against left parties in Ireland is actually coming from America, which is very, very interesting.

AMY GOODMAN: Seán, as we end, I wanted to go back to the Clonard houses, where you come from. You took us there yesterday and showed us a poem on a wall. We’re going to play that clip, but I’m wondering if you could introduce it for us.

SEÁN MURRAY: Yeah, well, the poem was a reflection of my own childhood and, you know, finding out about the complexities and kind of debunking the myths that I had about who I was and where I was from. Yes, I was separated from that wall, but I wasn’t told as a child the stories that I had heritage across that wall. So it opened up a whole new world for me, which is a kind of a microcosm for us all here that have to share this part of Ireland, you know. So, that’s what the poem is really about.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to that clip right now, Seán Murray reading his poem on the wall here in Belfast.

SEÁN MURRAY: So, the poem is called “The Chronicles of a People.” It’s about how both sides of my family come from either side of the wall. I have a Protestant family. My great-grandmother was Protestant. She came from a British background. And, of course, my other family, which were Irish republican, and most of my family members went to jails for IRA activities. So, the poem is “The Chronicles of a People.”

From the burning ashes of a Clonard Street is where I trace my own. Not fifty yards across the wall my blood runs blue as well. The red brick walls and darkened halls where secrets never met. For fear a neighbor lent his ear to something he’d regret.

Near fifty years of blood and tears, some said we’d never learn? To put the past behind us and embrace another world. But Belfast streets refuse to give its secrets of the past. With the unrelenting notion that the die’s already cast. My truth is mine and yours is yours, no need for compromise. When a monopoly of victims can hide a thousand lies. When pain and years of suffering is just reserved for some. The ones we leave behind us will not escape the gun.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Seán Murray, documentary filmmaker who lives in West Belfast. He has a new feature film premiering at the Docs Ireland festival titled Journacide: The War on Truth. To see Part 1 of our discussion, go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. We’re reporting from Belfast in the North of Ireland.