Poles living and working in Belfast have been attacked following crowd violence at the Northern Ireland - Poland World Cup qualifier last Saturday.
Polish immigrants’ homes have been attacked several times with assailants smashing windows and breaking into the houses and vandalising interiors.
The situation in Belfast has become so dangerous that on Monday night several Poles had to be evacuated from their apartments under police escort.
“On Saturday, they broke into the flat of my friend. Luckily she wasn’t home,” one of the migrants, Paweł Tokarski told the Dziennik daily. “They vandalised the ground floor and left a note: ‘Go back to Poland’,” he added.
Poland’s honorary consul in Northern Ireland, Jerome Mullen admits that Poles in Belfast are not safe. “They were left here with all this mess, in spite of the fact that the riots were instigated by football fans from outside Northern Ireland,” he said.
Before, during and after the game on Saturday, which Northern Ireland won by three goals to two, fights broke out between rival fans. Police said afterwards that much of the trouble had been instigated by fans travelling from Poland without tickets, who were intent on causing trouble.
Local Protestant politician, Jimmy Spratt condemned the attacks and told the BBC:
"Police have confirmed to me that Poles involved in earlier trouble are not resident in Northern Ireland and as such these attacks on the homes of foreign nationals in the Donegall Road area is totally illogical.”
However, four Polish fans pleaded guilty in court on Monday to disorderly conduct before the game, all of whom are currently resident in the UK.
Tomasz Bobrowicz, 30, from Suffolk, England, Przemyslaw Pawel Kusmierczyk, 28, from Liverpool, Lukasz Szwajda, 22, from London, and Tomasz Jakobik, 26, from University Avenue in Belfast, appeared at Belfast Magistrates' Court. Five other Poles detained after the game were released from police custody on Sunday night.
Was Boruc to blame?
Meanwhile, media in Glasgow, Scotland, where goalkeeper Artur Boruc - whose mistakes led to the loss for the Polish side on Saturday - plays his club football for Celtic, report that sectarian graffiti had been written in many parts of Belfast in the run up to the game, which increased the tension as fans from Poland drank in pubs, getting increasingly drunk. Boruc has been sanctioned by the Scottish Football Association in the past for making inflammatory sectarian gestures at games - particularly at Celtic - Rangers games where fan bases are divided on Catholic-Protestant lines.
Throughout the match, Boruc was the target of abuse from Northern Irish fans - treatment that many have argued led to his poor performance on the night.
For several years now, since Poland joined the EU and many moved to all parts of the UK, Poles have experienced periodic attacks in many parts of Northern Ireland, in what many think are sectarian incidents.
The Polish Association in Northern Ireland has tried to calming the conflict and has been working to forge an agreement between the Irish Protestants and Catholic immigrants from Poland and elsewhere in central and eastern Europe. But now the situation has become more urgent.
“We will talk to the representatives of the Irish community in order to ease the conflict and guarantee the security of Polish families. The talks will be very delicate and difficult,” said Maciej Bator, head of the association. (pg/jm)