The disturbing truth I found at the ‘good craic' Ballymena riots

Times

11 hours ago

It was a gorgeous summer evening in Ballymena on Wednesday. The weather was warm, and as dusk fell and a pink moon rose, hundreds came out and mingled on the grassy bank above Bridge Street: there were old couples, young families, groups of girls in their skimpiest tops. There was a carnival feel in the air. They'd all come to watch the riot.
This was civil disobedience as a social event. Old friends greeted each other before turning to comment on the action below. 'Ah, he's got a good arm there,' said a middle-aged man next to me as, 50 yards in front of us, one of an eddying mob of masked and hooded lads lobbed a brick towards the line of armoured police Land Rovers. The responding water cannon floated a welcome, cooling mist towards us on the breeze, and the crowd murmured appreciatively.
A couple of minutes' walk from the water cannon, over on North Street, another mixed, chummy crowd is milling around outside a terrace which is thought to house immigrants. From somewhere in the middle, cobblestones fly: upper floor windows shatter, to cheers from onlookers. Then one goes through the downstairs window — and the crowd groans.
'Ah no, that's messy,' says the chatty, middle-aged woman next to me, who is live-streaming the event on TikTok for her friends. 'That's not right: there's local people living in there, you know. It's the upstairs windows they want,' she says with a smile.
There was something strange and deeply unnerving about the riots in Ballymena. Yes, the spark that ignited them had a ghastly familiarity: on Monday, the charging of two 14-year-old Romanian-speaking boys for the alleged attempted rape of a teenage girl gave rise to a protest, which quickly turned into race-based violence. There were echoes of England's riots last summer in response to the Southport murders: the narrative — that vicious persecution and thuggery were a legitimate response to 'foreign' men attacking 'local' girls — was similar.
But here, that spark fell on different ground. Northern Ireland is not northern England. They do riots differently here. They've had a lot more practice.
'This sort of violence has been normalised,' says Sian Mulholland, the local Alliance Party member of the legislative assembly (MLA) for North Antrim. 'Through social media, and emboldened by our political leadership, people feel it's OK.' There's also what she calls 'generational trauma': the long legacy of the Troubles, in which rioting became almost a rite of passage in Northern Ireland. 'People think it's a good craic. You hear them say it on their live-streams.'
People do seem to be having a good craic. In fact, riots or not, people here smile a lot. Ballymena, population 31,000, is a strikingly friendly town. Everybody says so — including a woman I'll call Maria, a Romanian resident of Clonavon Road, the centre of last week's riots. 'They are really, really nice here,' she says when we chat on her doorstep on Thursday afternoon. A sales assistant, she has lived here happily for nine years, and says: 'Here is home for me, because I really love the people.'
And yet she had spent the previous two nights bedded down at friends' houses to escape the mob, which had rampaged along her street, attacking houses thought to contain immigrants. Doors were smashed off hinges, homes trashed and set alight. One of her neighbours had slept in her car; others had fled back to Romania. 'They begged my husband to drive them to the airport. They were in a bad situation, with small children, and they screamed, 'Please take us, take us from here.' They will not come back.'
So will she leave too? 'Tonight I will stay in my home,' she says defiantly, talking through tears. 'But after that, I don't know. I think maybe I will have to change my mind.' Under her feet, the worn doormat reads 'Home is where the heart is.'
The unrest comes on the back of what a recent report to the Northern Ireland Assembly called 'an unprecedented wave of international migration', with 293,000 arrivals to the province of 1.9m people since the millennium. Net migration for this period is around 62,000.
Across the border, where immigration hit a 17-year high in 2024, the Republic of Ireland has had outbreaks of violence too, with a wave of anti-migrant protests focused on asylum seekers' housing. The mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor became a figurehead for the attackers, and his language had a violent, nativist flavour: 'Ireland is on the cusp of losing its Irishness,' he said, describing rural towns as 'being overrun'.
Just 100 yards long, Clonavon Road is a picture-perfect street of vintage, stone-built terraced houses: plonk them down in an English city and the hipsters would flood in. Here the area, and neighbouring Harryville, are the cheapest part of town, and low rents have meant a high concentration of poor migrants.
Now, though, most intact windows display a Union Jack, or the red hand banner of Ulster, or pictures of the King and Queen, or Glasgow Rangers badges. Ballymena wears its staunch unionism on its sleeve — every lamppost on the long Antrim Road into town flies a Union Jack — and incomers and natives alike have seized on the symbols for protection. They're often displayed alongside a hastily printed sign reading 'Locals live here' or, in one case, 'I work in a care home'.
So far, rioters have injured 41 police officers. But their real target is the migrants. Mulholland has a liaison role for a charity that provides interpreters for migrants, and has passed on their desperate pleas for help to the police. 'One family were upstairs and heard the crowd kicking in the door, then coming in the house. They managed to get up to the attic and hid there. They sent us a video which I passed to the police, who eventually got through the crowd and evacuated them.
'There were eight adults and three children up there. A family hiding in an attic. It has a familiar ring to it doesn't it? There was a famous book about that.'
By day, most people in Ballymena condemn the rioting. In the quietly prosperous town centre, the most common adjective used by passers-by was 'ridiculous'. But it usually came with a qualifier.
'It's not doing any good,' said an elderly couple 'But, and we're not racist, there's an awful lot of, what do you say now … ethnic people, who hang around and make us feel uncomfortable.' At the Horse 'n' Jockey bar on Bryan Street, there was no equivocation. 'People have had enough and they're doing something about it,' said a man at the bar, to general agreement. 'They've taken over the kids' playpark and used it for prostitution.' When I ask who 'they' are, the answer is again unequivocal: 'It's the gypsies.'
The word may be offensive, but it's one I hear a lot on the streets of Ballymena. The men in masks used it, laced with obscenities, as they hurled bricks. Maria used it, keen to stress that while Romanian, she was not a 'gypsy'.
Local resentment has focused on the Roma community, relatively recent arrivals in Ballymena. The local MP, Jim Allister of Traditional Unionist Voice, singled them out in a statement: 'The influx of Roma, in particular, into Ballymena in recent years … has driven rapid demographic change,' he said.
Mulholland is appalled: 'It's creating a hierarchy of migrants: 'The Poles and Filipinos are OK because they work; it's the Roma that are the problem.' For me, that's not OK.'
In any case, the rioters don't seem too concerned about differentiating. In her tiny upstairs flat on Linenhall Street, Yelena Campo Reyes, 27, who came here from the Philippines last year to work in a meat processing factory, has also put a Union Jack across the window in the hope it will stop the stones.
'I saw a big fire outside,' she says. 'I thought it was just a bonfire but then suddenly the riot police came and this group started throwing bottles, stones, petrol at them. Then they attacked the car wash that is next door to us, where Romanians work, and they started throwing bricks at my window too.' She points at a crack in the glass.
'I was very scared. I understand the side of the locals that they don't want rapes. But you can't protect your community by destroying your community.'