Séamas O’Reilly: Ballymena violence is the result of politics based on scapegoating any ‘other’
A PSNI vehicle near to debris on fire on Wednesday night in Ballymena, Co Antrim. Petrol bombs, a hatchet and masonry were among items thrown at police, who responded with water cannon, dogs and plastic baton rounds in an attempt to disperse crowds in the Co Antrim town.
Ballymena is burning. Since Monday, protesters have descended on various streets in the Antrim town, following an alleged sexual assault of a girl.
Two 14-year-old boys have been charged with attempted rape, both presumed to be of migrant origin as they used a Romanian interpreter in court. Their solicitor said they would be denying the charges.
A peaceful vigil for the girl, commandeered by local agitators, spilled into full-on rioting – or, to use the odd euphemism so often deployed in the statelet I grew up in, “disturbances”.
Over the course of the next few nights, several migrant homes were attacked and destroyed, with dozens of PSNI officers assaulted and injured, and fulminating rhetoric from those protesting broadcast on social media, to anyone who’d listen.
The rioters’ response to news of the alleged assault was attacking homes of any and all migrants or “non-locals” they could find.
One was that of a Filipino family, the dad of whom worked for Wrightbus and came back from his shift to find his house in flames.
Assemblymember Sian Mulholland told Stormont of a family of three who were forced to barricade themselves in their attic as men “rampaged” downstairs.
Reaction has been swift and furious, with politicians and community leaders from all sides condemning the violence. Some did this, however, with a few more caveats than others.
North Antrim MP Jim Allister said the violence was “very distressing” and “senseless” but added that the context for the violence was that there had been “significant demographic change in the area” because of “unfettered immigration”.
Demographic change is, of course, a relative concept, but even its most gymnastic description would be hard to tally with this part of the world.
Indeed, “unfettered immigration” seems a somewhat odd descriptor for the Mid and East Antrim council area, in which Ballymena is situated, which has seen a net total of fewer than 5,000 international migrants settle there, this century.
Of course, any such change in population will be noticed by those with eyes to see it. Which is to say: those who oppose anyone who’s different, in any way, being anywhere near them.
It’s easy, therefore, to dismiss all of what is happening in Antrim right now as racist thuggery. Thankfully, it’s not just easy to do this, but correct.
To their credit, the PSNI have been clear-cut on this point, with the chair of their police federation Liam Kelly describing the violence as “mindless, unacceptable and feral” and the actions of the rioters as “a pogrom”.
There is no interpretation of these acts, no nuance or context that can be added, that points in any other direction.
Any talk of “simmering tensions” and “local anger” merely gets us away from the point at hand; the tension and anger is from people who believe all outsiders should be terrorised and killed, and we owe them, and their concerns, nothing but clear-eyed disgust.
None of this is new. I’m old enough to remember scenes of Catholics being ousted from their homes in Antrim, primarily because it still happens all the time.
Last July, the family of Jessy Clark, a nine-year-old boy with multiple serious disabilities, were allocated a newbuild bungalow in the Ballycraigy estate in Antrim town.
The home was purpose-built to provide for Jessy’s medical needs, allowing him the facility to bathe and use his wheelchair, freedoms he’d been denied in the hospital bed he’d been living in for years.
Shortly before the family were due to move in, the house was attacked with bricks and paint bombs.
Soon its boarded-up windows featured graffiti of crosshairs, and slogans declared that all such housing was for “locals only”.
The LVF-affiliated group responsible for this were implicated in a several other attacks in the area, driving eight African families out of their homes in the few weeks previous.
Deducing this took little by way of detective work, since the group posted laminated signs around the area declaring “No Undesirables… No Multiculturalism” and warnings to “keyboard warriors” that their home might be next.
What we’re seeing now in Ballymena is the downstream effect of a political project based on scapegoating any “other” who looks, speaks or prays differently. It is not new, no matter how much of it is broadcast online or egged on by bad actors on social media.
MLAs from across Northern Ireland have criticised DUP MLA Gordon Lyons, who confirmed that displaced Ballymena migrants had been housed in Larne Leisure Centre, hours before that location was set alight by a mob. 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.
