The Ballymena riots have nothing to do with protecting women

In 2018, Belfast’s most high-profile rape trial came to a close. The accused, two Ireland and Ulster rugby stars, were found not guilty, but few had waited for the verdict to make up their minds. During the nine-week trial, their accuser had already been deemed a liar, and named so many times on social media that two men were arrested for revealing her identity.

In November, Jeffrey Donaldson – the former leader of the DUP – will face trial charged with historical sex offences over a 23-year period. Just this month, a man in Belfast appeared in court, charged with attacking and raping a woman armed with a hammer. And this week a bodybuilder from Ballymena was jailed for five months for punching a female police officer and assaulting a woman outside a bar.

These cases concern either allegations of sexual offences or a conviction for violence against women. Not one has prompted a riot. And yet this week, Northern Ireland has endured days of violent disorder after two 14-year-old boys appeared in court on Monday, charged with the sexual assault of a girl in Ballymena.

If these boys had been local, perhaps we would have spent four days hand-wringing over their radicalisation and the normalisation of sexual violence against women and girls. But the BBC reported the pair, who deny the charges, spoke through a Romanian translator. And so instead, their town has been ravaged by racist violence.

By midweek the unrest spread to nearby Larne, where a leisure centre holding displaced families was torched. In Ballymena, gangs wearing balaclavas filmed themselves setting houses on fire and shouting “where are the foreigners”. A Belfast woman told me how she’d overheard one man, who was involved in the disorder, make a casual, yet chilling, distinction: “If they’re from here they can stay. If they’re foreigners we’re getting them out.”

It’s not just Romanian families being targeted. Slovakian, Czech and Polish people living in Ballymena are also fearful for their lives and homes. A viral image circulating on Wednesday showed a front door covered with a Union Jack and a Filipino flag – an attempt to convince the rioters not to target them. There are now more houses with more Union Jack and Northern Ireland flags.

The atmosphere in Northern Ireland since then has not been febrile but despairing, ashamed. A small pocket of a community making the world look at us again for all the worst reasons.

Coverage from outside the north has drawn comparisons with disorder in Southport last summer, or with anti-immigration protests in the Republic of Ireland. They’ve equated this violence with “white working-class” violence more widely. Disregarding the classism embedded in that logic, it’s an assumption that ignores a more specific local context.

Unrest in the north can always be ignited more easily than in Britain. Growing up in Belfast, summers in particular were always violent times. The Drumcree standoff, a five-year long dispute about where the Orange Order were allowed to march, led to riots every 12th of July. I was at primary school when the Holy Cross dispute erupted, which saw British soldiers deployed to protect Catholic children walking to school from being attacked by fireworks and blast-bombs. Union flags were also put on houses as talismans in Bombay Street in August 1969, when Catholics were burned out of their homes by loyalist mobs.

The far right says that this violence has erupted because the safety of women in Northern Ireland has been compromised by migration.

Overall immigration rates in Northern Ireland are low, with 8.7% of people born outside the UK according to 2021 census data. At 17.6% Ballymena has the third highest rate for a district in Northern Ireland, although it is average when compared to the rest of the United Kingdom. Over the years it’s been subject to viral claims from English politicians that it's been “flooded by Romanian gypsies”.

Those posting on social media in support of the riots are parroting the usual claims that once you could walk the streets here as a woman “without fear or worry”. “It is utterly heartbreaking that this is no longer true,” wrote one woman. Of course, it was never true.

Northern Ireland is, statistically speaking, one of the most dangerous places in Europe to be a woman. Research released by Ulster University in January this year revealed that 98% of women in Northern Ireland have experienced at least one form of violence or abuse in their lifetime, with 50% subjected to it before the age of 11. This violence often originates within the home, or from men the women already know. This was still true during the Troubles, when immigration was understandably much lower than it is now.

It is not true that Ballymena has been newly corrupted. The town, known locally as Northern Ireland’s own Bible Belt, has the third highest level of legal gun ownership in the north. It banned screenings of Brokeback Mountain due to its depiction of homosexuality. It has a long history of both heroin abuse and loyalist sectarian violence. A Catholic primary school and Catholic church marred by arson attacks were both forced to close, its parishioners moved to the outskirts of town. It is true that its bigots have a fresh target.

This is little comfort for the families fearing for their safety and terrified to sleep as the rioting continues. Local politicians have already failed them. On Thursday, a DUP minister was branded “unfit for office” after he criticised the shelter-in-place of families in Larne leisure centre, before it was nearly burned to the ground. “Protesting is of course a legitimate right,” said Gordon Lyons.

But these are not protests. And they’re not about protecting women either. In Northern Ireland, a place where things are often spoken about in coded language or left unsaid, there’s power in calling things what they are. This is racism.

Photograph by Paul Faith / AFP via Getty Images