Why Northern Ireland Is Really Rioting

Until our leaders confront the invasion of foreigners of a different culture who refuse to assimilate, there will be many more Ballymenas to come. 

From The European Conservative

By Lauren Smith

The anti-immigration protests in Ballymena are a violent backlash against an unprecedented demographic upheaval.

For the fourth night in a row, Ballymena, Northern Ireland, has been gripped by unrest.

Riots broke out on Monday, following reports of an alleged sexual assault against a young girl. Two 14-year-old boys then appeared in court, charged with attempted rape, and were assisted in the courtroom by a Romanian interpreter. The assumption that the teenagers were foreigners fuelled speculation and anger in a town where tensions between the native population and migrant communities were already running high. Consequently, what began as a peaceful protest to show support for the victim and her family soon morphed into the days-long anti-migrant rioting we are currently seeing play out. 

Over the past few days, rioters have set fire to homes, cars, and even to a leisure centre in nearby Larne, where people displaced by the violence were being sheltered. Police have been targeted with petrol bombs and bricks. In response, officers are deploying water cannons and have fired plastic baton rounds to disperse crowds. The violence is largely indiscriminate, but certain ethnic groups have been targeted more than others. Signs have appeared on some houses clarifying the nationalities of the residents, in the hope of avoiding vandalism and arson. Some declare they are a “British household,” but others announce that “Filipinos live here.” Broadly speaking, local resentment appears to be directed more strongly toward certain groups than others, particularly the Roma community. 

The unrest has since spread to the surrounding towns of Coleraine, Newtonabbey, and Carrickfergus, with police describing it as “racially motivated.” Sinn Fein vice-president Michelle O’Neill echoed this sentiment, telling reporters on Wednesday: “It’s pure racism, there is no other way to dress it up.” UK prime minister Keir Starmer was quick to condemn the events, too, denouncing the “mindless attacks” on police during Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday. But to call the riots “mindless” betrays his lack of understanding—or perhaps wilful avoidance–of the deeper frustrations simmering in towns like Ballymena. 

Of course, violence like this should never be condoned. But nor can we ignore the factors that inflamed it. For starters, what is happening in Ballymena right now is far from an isolated incident. It is particularly reminiscent of the riots in Southport, Merseyside, last year. These erupted after 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana stabbed three young girls to death at a dance class. Reporting restrictions initially protected Rudakubana’s identity, as he was under 18, which in turn created a vacuum of information, allowing false rumours to spread online. The most prominent of these was the suggestion that the attacker was actually an asylum seeker or Muslim migrant. This turned out not to be the case—Rudakubana was the son of Rwandan migrants and was raised in the UK. But that the police were so cagey about his identity led many to believe that the incident was some kind of terror attack, covered up so as to not inflame tensions. In response to this, protests soon erupted in Southport and spread across the country.

Something similar also happened in Dublin the year before. In the middle of the day, a man attacked a group of children outside a primary school, injuring four. In the same way as in Southport, details about the assailant’s background were initially withheld and online speculation ran rife. It was eventually confirmed that the suspect was a man of Algerian origin, who held Irish citizenship. But by that point, the damage had been done. The incident led to the most violent riot in modern Dublin history. 

This is why Ballymena feels so familiar. As in Dublin, Southport, and in so many other towns across the UK and the island of Ireland, Ballymena has gone through an unprecedented economic, social and demographic upheaval in the last few years. At the time of the most recent census in 2021, roughly 5% of the population came from a minority-ethnic background, with Roma people making up the largest group. Around 16% of Ballymena is foreign-born, which makes it far more diverse than the rest of Northern Ireland. In the Harryville area of Ballymena, nearly 60% of primary school children don’t speak English as a first language. As such, the influx of such a large number of people over a short period of time has been jarring for many residents, who no longer recognise the area they have lived their whole lives. 

To make matters worse, Ballymena has been effectively deindustrialised. Factories and plants have closed down over the last few decades. Those that haven’t now rely heavily on low-cost migrant labour, and stable, well-paid work is increasingly hard to come by. 

In some of the town’s most deprived areas, the majority of the population is foreign. In Clonavon Terrace, where the protests first emerged, roughly half of the street is Roma. Locals routinely complain about the higher levels of crime and general distrust this group has brought to the community. 

What was once a tight-knit, mostly working-class community now feels alienated and fragmented. Similar sentiments can be found all across the post-industrial UK, where economic decline has been paired with fast-paced demographic change. This is why no one should feign surprise over the Ballymena riots, nor at any other unrest that came before or will inevitably come after it. In any community that has been subjected to mass migration, against the consent of the local population, the potential for outbursts of violence like this will always exist. 

This is, of course, virtually impossible for our political classes to comprehend. Yes, the riots in Ballymena are “mindless” in the sense that innocent people are being targeted by inexcusable vandalism and violence. But it is also the predictable consequence of a country being changed beyond recognition by mass migration—without debate, without consent, and without any care for the people who must bear the brunt of it. Until our leaders confront this, there will be many more Ballymenas to come.