Three teenagers charged following violence in Ballymena
Three teenagers have been charged following disorder in Ballymena.
The three males, aged 15, 17 and 18 years have been charged with riot, while the 15-year-old has also been charged with criminal damage following scenes in the Co Antrim town on Tuesday night.
They are to appear before Ballymena Magistrates' Court later.
Meanwhile, two other teenage boys who were arrested during the disorder have been released on bail to allow for further police inquiries.
A PSNI vehicle near to debris on fire during a third night of disorder in Ballymena, Co Antrim (Liam McBurney/PA)
Police in Northern Ireland condemned a third consecutive night of 'completely unacceptable' disorder on Thursday morning.
They said on Wednesday night in Ballymena their officers came under sustained attack with multiple petrol bombs, a hatchet, heavy masonry, bricks and fireworks thrown at them.
Officers responded with water cannon, dogs and plastic baton rounds in an attempt to disperse crowds in the town.
Nine officers were injured, while two men, aged in their 20s, and one in their 30s, along with two teenagers, were arrested on suspicion of riotous behaviour and other offences in connection with the disorder on Wednesday.
Police said officers discharged a number of Attenuating Energy Projectiles (AEPs) and the water cannon was deployed once again in an attempt to disperse and calm crowds.
Meanwhile, police said they responded to an attack on the local leisure centre in Larne.
Masked protesters blocked local roads in the Marine Highway area of Carrickfergus, a teenager was arrested in Newtownabbey following disorder in the Station Road area and in Coleraine, a bus was attacked, bins were set alight on the train tracks and petrol bombs were thrown at police.
They added that associated protests passed without incident in the Antrim and Lisburn areas, and there were mainly peaceful protests in Belfast.
PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Ryan Henderson speaks during a press conference at PSNI headquarters in east Belfast on Wednesday (Rebecca Black/PA)
Assistant Chief Constable Ryan Henderson said there was a significant policing operation on Wednesday night.
'What we witnessed last night has caused fear and huge disruption within our communities, including to our local transport network and community services,' he said.
'Police officers came under attack from petrol bombs, fireworks and heavy masonry.
'A hatchet was also thrown at police lines during this disorder in a clear attempt to seriously injure our officers, and I thank them once again for their continued efforts putting themselves on the line keeping our streets safe.
'We made six arrests last night during this disorder and more will follow. We are working hard to identify all those responsible in this criminal disorder, and those involved will be dealt with using the full force of the law.
Firefighters outside Larne Leisure Centre following a fire and vandalism at the facility (Liam McBurney/PA)
'We are now in the process of gathering evidence, CCTV and other footage of yesterday's disorder, and anyone who has information or who can help identify those responsible is asked to contact police on 101.
'I would strongly urge anyone who was involved in yesterday's rioting and disorder to think long and hard about their actions and its impact. I would also appeal for calm voices and cool heads to reduce tensions.'
Earlier, Secretary of State Hilary Benn described scenes as 'shocking', adding there is 'absolutely no justification for civil disorder'.
He told the BBC's Good Morning Ulster programme: 'This not what Northern Ireland is about, this is not what we want the rest of the world to see.
'We all, as elected representatives, have a responsibility to seek to calm things down, to support those in the community trying to keep people safe, principally the PSNI, to work with community leaders to lower tensions.
'Whatever views people hold, there is no justification for trying to burn people out of their homes, that is what is going on, and that is what needs to stop because it is shocking and damaging, and it reflects very badly of the image of Northern Ireland that we all want to send to the rest of the world.'
Stormont Justice Minister Naomi Long said it has been a 'three-day festival of hate and destruction' which needs to stop before someone loses their life.
She said she will be seeking additional funding for the PSNI in the June Monitoring Round.
She also commended the PSNI for seeking support through a mutual aid request for additional officers from Great Britain.
'This is not just a few days of violence, this has been wanton destruction on a huge scale, and any police service in these islands who are dealing with this kind of pressure, dealing with the number of officers, now close to 50, who have been injured in the last few days, would clearly be feeling the challenge and the strain,' she told the BBC.
Wednesday marked the third night of violence in Ballymena (Jonathan McCambridge/PA)
The leisure centre had temporarily been used as an emergency shelter for those in urgent need following disturbances in Ballymena earlier in the week.
Communities Minister Gordon Lyons, who highlighted the use of the building in a social media post, said all those who had been staying at the leisure centre are in the care of the Housing Executive and have been moved out of Larne.
SDLP MLA Matthew O'Toole, the leader of the opposition in the Northern Ireland Assembly, said he would refer Mr Lyons to the standards commission following the fire.
In the town on Wednesday, the PSNI deployed riot police for a third night in a row as hundreds gathered around the Clonavon Terrace area.
At least one protester was struck by plastic baton rounds fired by police while officers also used a water cannon on the crowd.
Officers used dog units and drones in their response to the gathering.
Riot police with shields advanced on the crowd to disperse them down Bridge Street on to other roads.
PSNI vehicles formed a barricade outside The Braid, Ballymena Town Hall Museum and Arts Centre (Liam McBurney/PA)
They came under sustained attack as those participating in disorder hurled petrol bombs, masonry and fireworks at police vehicles and officers standing nearby.
Rioters smashed the windows of a house on North Street and set multiple fires on streets in the surrounding area.
The disorder and stand-off with police continued past midnight.
The PSNI have also noted scenes of disorder in Belfast, Lisburn, Carrickfergus and Newtownabbey earlier in the week, as businesses, homes and cars were attacked and damaged.
By Wednesday, six individuals had been arrested for public order offences, and one charged.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he 'utterly condemns' violence which left 32 police officers injured after the second night of disturbances.
Northern Ireland deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly, right, met residents in Clonavon Terrace on Tuesday (Niall Carson/PA)
PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher has warned the rioting 'risks undermining' the criminal justice process into an allegation of a sex attack on a teenage girl in Ballymena at the weekend.
Stormont ministers have also made an urgent appeal for calm and said the justice process had to be allowed to take its course.
First Minister Michelle O'Neill and deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly appeared together on Wednesday to voice their condemnation.
Sinn Féin vice-president Ms O'Neill told reporters in Belfast: 'It's pure racism, there is no other way to dress it up.'
Ms Little-Pengelly described the scenes in Ballymena as 'unacceptable thuggery'.
Northern Ireland's First Minister Michelle O'Neill and deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly speak to media at the Ulster Hall in Belfast on Wednesday (David Young/PA)
With the protests focused in predominantly loyalist areas in Ballymena, Ms O'Neill said she did not believe it would be helpful for her to visit in the current context. DUP MLA Ms Little-Pengelly met residents in the town on Wednesday and said the local community are in fear and wanted the violence to stop.
'The key message here today is around that violence, and that the violence needs to stop, that's what the community wants to put across, and that's why I'm here to send that very clear and united message from right throughout the community and local residents for that to stop,' she said.
The violence began around Clonavon Terrace on Monday night following an earlier peaceful protest which was organised in support of the family of a girl who was the victim of an alleged sexual assault in the area.
Two teenage boys, who spoke to a court through a Romanian interpreter, have been charged.
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Irish Daily Mirror
2 hours ago
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Irish Examiner
6 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Séamas O'Reilly: Ballymena violence is the result of politics based on scapegoating any ‘other'
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Lyons says the information was in the public domain when he put it on social, and had been confirmed by the local council, but has not elaborated on why he felt the need to specify that he had not been consulted on this decision. Lyons, for those who don't know - and may now scarcely believe it - is Northern Ireland's Communities Minister. One might be tempted to imagine any other situation in which innocent people were rehoused for, say, flooding, fire, or some other natural disaster, only for their Community Minister to refer to them not as constituents, or traumatised people in fear for their lives, but as "individuals", housed only "temporarily", and making sure to point out that he and his party colleagues had no part in giving them shelter. I grew up around this hoary old routine; sectarian prejudice dressed up with talk about jobs, housing or religious identity, now being wheeled out in terms of law and order, grotesquely weaponizing an awful alleged crime to bring brickbats and firebombs to the homes of peaceful, terrified foreigners. The central perversity of treating these people as anything other than racist thugs is only more transparent in Ballymena because they have so few migrants that any other excuse is patently absurd. It's the same skit we've seen at play for decades, the same justification as in Southport and Dublin and East Belfast before, and will see again for as long as these people have hate in their hearts, an X account, and a brick at arm's reach. We are not witness to a disturbance, but a pogrom. It behoves us to say so, loud and clear. Read More Séamas O'Reilly: Many of the tropes of standard Irishness are not universally applied both sides of the border
Irish Examiner
6 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
How a dog called Fern solved the mystery of where Cork woman Tina Satchwell had been hidden
When Fern made a positive detection for the presence of human remains in the home of Richard and Tina Satchwell, the dog helped unravel the mystery of where the missing woman had been hidden for more than six years. After Richard Satchwell was sentenced to life in prison for the 2017 murder of his wife, the role of Fern in the case and the absence of a cadaver dog in An Garda Síochána's dog unit has raised hackles, led to soundbites and sparked debate on why the Irish force had to rely on the PSNI's only cadaver dog. Use of Fern in October 2023 for the search of Ms Satchwell's Youghal home was not the only time the services of a cadaver dog were requested by gardaí during the probe into her disappearance. The first time was in 2018, when Ronnie, a dog from Britain, was brought to Castlemartyr for a woodland search after information led gardaí to concentrate on the area. Mick Swindells has worked on a number of other high-profile cases in Ireland, including a search of the Slieve Bloom mountains for Fiona Pender in 2014. Ronnie's handler, Mick Swindells, a former British police officer, recalls staying in Garryvoe during the 2018 search, and says the approach came from gardaí because of his work with the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains, set up to find the bodies of people murdered and secretly buried by republicans during the Troubles. He has worked on a number of other high-profile cases in Ireland, including a search of the Slieve Bloom mountains for Fiona Pender in 2014. She has been missing since 1996 and her case was recently upgraded to a murder investigation. He became involved in human remains detection in 1992 when working with the dogs section in Lancashire police. He has handled five cadaver dogs in his career, but also trained dogs in Britain as well as in the Malaysian and Spanish fire services, and Spanish police. He pointed out training dogs to find human remains in water is different to training them to find buried remains 'because they can smell scent coming through the water'. For land searches, probes are used to prod the ground to release any odours which could indicate if human remains are buried in the area. He stressed, however, that the manner of a person's death can have an impact on the scent, explaining: 'Somebody who has been poisoned will decompose differently to somebody who has shot or stabbed, if there is trauma. "Indeed, the size of a person and the type of soil they have been put in also changes decomposition — also, if there were clothes, or they were wrapped in a shower curtain or carpet or that kind of thing.' He said in most cases, people do not have time to bury remains very deep — although he acknowledged cases like the Tina Satchwell case were different. During the recent trial, the jury heard her body had been buried unusually deep for a 'clandestine burial', with 84cm depth to the bottom of the burial site. 'He [Satchwell] was in his own house so he controlled the environment, whereas when you are burying bodies in woods … even the IRA didn't bury bodies deep and they had control of the areas. In his own house, he could take his time, he wasn't going to be disturbed,' Mr Swindells said. In his work, cadaver dogs are trained on pigs. He explains why: 'If you train a dog to find Semtex and you hide a block of Semtex, it won't change. But, obviously, a dead body evolves and is always changing. So we have to try to train the dog to find a body from, for example, one day after death to 25 years after death when it is just pure skeletal. So you have to train the dog on every aspect of the decomposition and the only way you can do that is by using pigs. It is similar decomposition.' A pig dressed in a coat and placed in a grave. Mick Swindells says the coat has been put on the pig to simulate a real concealment, for the purpose of training a cadaver dog. He says pigs used for the purpose of training dogs to find human remains are buried in the ground for many years. 'We had a site in the UK where we buried pigs in 1992 and every so often we went back there with dogs if we are looking at a really old case to refresh them. Pigs are the closest thing to human because they are omnivores — pigs eat meat and vegetables the same as we do. They have the same skin type — the same number of layers of skin as we do, the same digestive system as we do.' He says the normal police course for training dogs to find human remains is eight weeks: 'The basic course is eight weeks but the dog is always learning after that.' The Search and Rescue Dog Association Ireland (North) currently has four specially trained cadaver dogs in Northern Ireland. The association's Clair O'Connor says: 'We would use archaeological bone or human blood in training. We get blood from donors.' The association, which was founded in 1978 by Cork-born Dr Neil Powell, began working in the area of human remains detection in the 1990s, after being tasked to a search for two cousins who drowned in a lake. Wexford-based Rachell Morris owns K9 Detect and Find Ireland. She and Clair O'Connor both say they have had requests to aid An Garda Síochána over the years with searches. 13/06/'25 Gardaí bring a cadaver dog into a house on Monastery Walk, Clondalkin, where they are continuing their search in the investigation into the death of American woman, Annie McCarrick, who disappeared in 1993. Picture: Colin Keegan/ Collins However, on Monday, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris said there were no plans at the moment to acquire a cadaver dog for the force . He described such a dog as a very specialised resource which is not out every day working, as is the case for drugs, firearms or money dogs. He also said a cadaver dog has only been used by the force three times in the seven years he has been commissioner. It emerged at Tuesday afternoon's meeting of the Oireachtas justice committee that a cadaver dog was used in the search for Kerry farmer Mike Gaine in the early weeks of his disappearance. Mick Swindells believes the addition of a cadaver dog to An Garda Síochána's existing dog unit would not be a big cost. 'If you train them to forensics and blood and semen also, you are not restricting it to murders because you have got assault cases, rape cases, that they can be used for as well.' He rejected minister for justice Jim O'Callaghan's assertion that the working life of a cadaver dog was just three years. He said police dogs operate until they are no longer fit enough to work, with many having a work life of up to seven years, typically retiring at about nine years old. This was echoed by Clair O'Connor, who said: 'All of our search dogs would work until they are aged eight to 10 years old.' A Garda spokeswoman confirmed the force has never had its own cadaver dog. She said there were 28 dogs attached to the Garda Dog Unit, inclusive of the Southern and North Western Dog Units. There are currently four dogs in training. The statement said: 'The Garda Dog Unit has dogs trained in three distinct disciplines, namely general purpose, drugs/cash/firearms detection, and explosive detection. Dogs are trained in one discipline.' In relation to cadaver dogs, the statement said: 'The operational demand for victim recovery dogs is currently sufficiently provided for through third-party contractors or through mutual assistance with the Police Service of Northern Ireland with whom An Garda Síochána has excellent working relations.' Read More Review of Tina Satchwell case to include if cadaver dog should have been used in 2017 search — Harris
