Ballymena has always been proud of its place within the UK, but this week, the union jacks and images of King Charles festooning houses multiplied in the predominantly Protestant town.
After racist violence erupted there on Monday, before spreading to other parts of Northern Ireland in four nights of disturbances, many Ballymena homes are also displaying yellow posters with “LOCALS LIVE HERE”.
Some houses have shattered glass or are boarded up. The window of a local violin maker is criss-crossed with tape to protect it from smashing. A sign on the shop reads: “This shop is run by a local man who works very hard for the community. Please do not damage these premises.”
Racially motivated attacks have overtaken sectarian attacks in the region, where entrenched divisions remain between Catholic nationalist and Protestant unionist communities still scarred by the three decades-long Troubles.
Police have blamed “bigots and racists” for this week’s “thuggery”. Northern Ireland is by far the least racially diverse part of the UK, with just 3.4 per cent of the population from an ethnic minority, compared with 12.9 per cent in Scotland and 18.3 per cent across England and Wales.
The protests, reminiscent of race-related rioting in Belfast and England last summer, reflect the “hidden issues of Northern Ireland being historically not very exposed to newcomers and a society divided along the lines of sectarian identity and belonging”, said Ulrike Vieten, a senior lecturer on the sociology of migration and racism at Queen’s University in Belfast.
“It’s a dangerous cocktail.”
Integrating immigrants into a region where Troubles-era “peace walls” still divide some nationalist and unionist communities and education remains segregated may be hard. Some deprived parts of Northern Ireland have never felt a peace dividend and productivity is among the lowest in the UK.
As in Britain, however, Northern Ireland employs many immigrants in healthcare. “You are welcome . . . We are the better for your presence here,” the region’s chief medical, nursing and other health officers said on Friday.
Racial tensions in Ballymena boiled over on Monday night after a peaceful protest against the alleged attempted rape of a girl by two teenagers who were charged in court in Romanian via an interpreter. The teenagers deny the charges.
Ugly scenes spiralled: homes were attacked and even set alight in scenes reminiscent of sectarian attacks from the 1960s when Catholic homes in Belfast were torched. As Irish broadcaster RTÉ interviewed a Ukrainian resident in Ballymena, a passing motorist yelled: “Burn them all out.”
“History has shown us here, more than anywhere, what happens when communities fracture,” Jon Boutcher, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, told a news conference on Thursday. “Let’s not stand for this nonsense any longer.”
In Ballymena, Frances, a Nigerian woman who asked not to give her real name, decked her house out in union jacks, a picture of King Charles and a “Locals live here” sign after her rubbish bin was set alight. “I had to put up the flag so they don’t burn my car and my house,” she said.
The intimidation, whipped up on social media, amplified some locals’ belief that foreign-born people were cashing in on welfare benefits. Boutcher said some were forced to hide in attics and wardrobes from the mobs.
Disturbances spread to the coastal town of Larne, where a sports centre was set on fire on Wednesday while children were inside, and on Thursday to Portadown, south of Belfast, where protesters hurled bricks at police. A housing association urged residents to move temporarily for their safety.
A large police presence in Portadown contained the disorder and extra police were drafted in from Scotland to help the under-resourced PSNI.
Edcel Santos, 33, from the Philippines, was drawn to Ballymena by a job at the local Wrightbus factory, which makes hydrogen buses.
“I came here because the salary was good,” Santos said. But his house was attacked while he was on the night shift and now he is looking to move. “When I came here, it was good. Now, there’s a lot of trouble.”
Some immigrant families have already packed up and left. Monika Rodzinska, 29, a single mother who arrived from Poland 10 years ago to work in a chicken processing plant and now has a job in a hotel, is planning to stay. But she said: “I’m so scared.”
Timothy Gaston, from the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice party which had an alliance with anti-immigration Reform UK in last year’s general election, said the disorder “was always going to happen simply because people’s concerns have not been listened to”.
But Archbishop John McDowell, head of the protestant Church of Ireland, feared that “the scapegoating of people whose skin is a different colour, who speak different languages . . . will allow policymakers to continue to ignore the actual, deep-seated problems which make Northern Ireland a place of low productivity and social and political unease”.
The rioting has increased tensions in the Stormont executive, which yokes together nationalist and unionist parties in an often fragile forced alliance set up by the 1998 peace deal that ended the Troubles.
Gordon Lyons, communities minister from the pro-UK Democratic Unionist party, faced opposition calls for him to resign — including from nationalist Sinn Féin first minister Michelle O’Neill — after he highlighted on social media that the Larne leisure centre was housing people temporarily relocated from the Ballymena rioting. Lyons insists he will not step down.
Thursday night’s disturbances were smaller than previous days but police remain on alert a month before the traditional pro-UK marching season, which has been a flashpoint for disturbances in the past.
As Vieten put it: “The particular problem of Northern Ireland is that it’s always tied to the history of division.”
