Far-right activists from the Republic are crossing the border in a bid to stir up anti-immigrant feeling in nationalist areas of Northern Ireland, a new report has found.
The Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ) examined the Locals First Initiative in Newry.
The group was set up last year to oppose Newry, Mourne and Down District Council’s plans to join the City of Sanctuary network.
Belfast City Council, Queen’s University and 42 schools in the north are already members.
Newry, Mourne and Down council ratified its decision to join last October.
The report found that the Locals First Initiative draws “support, cooperation, and direction from southern-based actors”.
CAJ said this marked a departure from far-right organising previously seen in the north, which largely involved British far-right figures in loyalist areas.
Researchers found almost no overlap between accounts promoting the group’s public meeting in Newry in January and the online networks behind anti-immigration protests in Belfast and elsewhere last year.
Just six of 425 accounts had shared both.
Of the 25 Facebook groups used to promote the Newry meeting, over half (14) were in the Republic.
They included anti-immigration pages based in Citywest and Loughlinstown in Dublin.
The group’s posts were shared in nine buy-and-sell pages across Ireland, whose memberships “vastly outnumbered” those of anti-immigrant groups and provided a “captive audience”.
Other pages used to promote the meeting included a Homes for Ukraine group, a page for helping the homeless and a walking group.
An advert for the meeting was posted in a Newry buy-and-sell page with more than 21,000 members the day before it took place, by an account linked to the Newry protest group, in contravention of the page’s rules.
The report said posting in such groups did not mean their administrators or members agreed with the content.
A rally organised by the group in Newry in September 2025 was addressed by a spokesman for Siol na hEireann, a Donegal-based Christian nationalist group, alongside two DUP councillors.
A former candidate for the Republic’s Irish Freedom Party in Dundalk played a leading role in an earlier anti-immigration rally in the city.
Politically, Sinn Fein was the main focus of the group’s criticism, while the DUP was the only party it spoke of positively.
The report found that where the DUP was praised on the group’s Facebook page, for its stance on immigration “in the absence of an Irish nationalist alternative”.
CAJ said the group was following the tactics of “other Irish anti-immigrant groups who view Sinn Fein as currently representing the working-class communities in which they are seeking to establish an organisational foothold”.
The report warned that “groups like [the Locals First Initiative] who normalise, mislead and inflame tensions around immigration, can present a clear risk to the safety of minoritised communities”.
The anti-immigration campaign has so far failed to win any significant local support, according to the report.
It said the group currently lacks the support to be a “credible electoral alternative” ahead of council elections in May 2027, but warned this “cannot be ruled out”.
PSNI figures show hate crime at its highest level since records began, with 2,367 race hate incidents recorded in 2025/26.
