The disturbing truth I found at the ‘good craic' Ballymena riots
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.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Revealed: Kenneth Noye's new life. He brutally stabbed two men and stole £26m. Now as he swans around Kent with a much younger lover and plays doting grandfather, friends expose the dark truth
Life, of late, has been undeservedly kind to Kenneth Noye. Despite having a couple of killings under his belt, not to mention a ruthless hand in one of the most lucrative heists in British history, the gangster is a familiar sight on the streets of Sevenoaks, Kent. He is often seen pottering around his local supermarket, clutching an eco-friendly bag for life, nipping into the gym opposite his top-floor flat or simply whizzing around in his Mercedes 4x4. Noye, 78, has been spotted, too, playing the part of doting grandfather alongside other families during sports day at a nearby £30,000-a-year private school.
Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
GUY ADAMS: Vegan influencer and founder of the hate-filled gossip website Tattle Life Sebastian Bond is said to be lying low in Thailand. Now he's feared to be trying to hide his fortune - as a raft of celebrities on his site line up to sue...
Every notable king has a castle – and, for Sebastian Bond, that fortress is a four-bedroom house lying a stone's throw from Glastonbury 's historic abbey. Security cameras monitor the driveway, which is protected by a set of tall metal gates, and, when the Mail visited this week, the curtains on every single window were firmly drawn.
Times
4 hours ago
- Times
How the IRA stole £26.5 million in a single night — and got away with it
If you ever thought, as I did growing up there, that Northern Ireland's fame was limited to 30 years of bombs and bullets, or building a ship that sank on its maiden voyage — you'd better think again. Twenty-one years ago, we were also host to the biggest robbery in British or Irish history at the time — in fact, the sixth biggest robbery in the world. Pretty impressive, eh? In one sense, it was impressive. On December 20, 2004, £26.5 million in cash was stolen from the Northern Bank headquarters in Belfast's city centre — in clear view of the public as Christmas shoppers strolled round the continental market just feet away. Glenn Patterson, an admired Belfast-based novelist, has written a book showing how the robbers did it, and how they got away with it. It was not just a monetary robbery, but a symbolic one. The Northern Bank building is a landmark in Belfast's post-industrial city centre, a great, sturdy 1970s edifice in concrete. It's a building you can imagine Bill Bixby walking out of, coat over shoulder, in the credits for The Incredible Hulk. But the robbery was not the first of its kind that year. Already in 2004 there had been other 'tiger kidnappings', where robbers would take family members hostage and force bank employees to help them to carry out the heist. In response, the Northern Bank had changed its operations so that two key holders were needed simultaneously to access its cash vaults. The criminals' solution? To abduct two employees' family members at once. Kevin McMullan, the bank's assistant manager, and Chris Ward, a junior employee, both had a knock on the door the night before the robbery. Armed men took over their homes and held their families hostage while McMullan and Ward were taken away. The men were held overnight, then told to go to work the next day and act normally. At clocking-off time they were to use their access to remove cash from the vault, disguised in containers to look like rubbish, and load it into a waiting white van. And so they did: great blocks and boxes of new and used notes, kilos upon kilos of it. The cover of Patterson's book shows a CCTV image of Ward leaving the bank's side entrance with a holdall over one shoulder. The holdall contains £1.2 million. Little wonder he's leaning to one side to counter the weight. So who did it? There's no doubt: the only criminal outfit in Northern Ireland with the organisational capability to plan and execute the robbery so methodically was the IRA. (The single sign of amateurishness was that two men in the van wore Russ Abbot-style ginger 'Jimmy' wigs beneath their baseball caps. This odd sight alerted passersby and almost foiled the robbery.) Opinions are divided on why the IRA carried out the robbery. For a pension fund? Investment abroad? • The 21 best history books of the past year to read next The whole story is presented beautifully by Patterson, who adopts the right tone for each phase of the tale. The abduction scenes have the horrible tension of a thriller, and reminded me of Brian Moore's great Troubles novel Lies of Silence. Elsewhere, Patterson adopts a tone of amused incredulity at the shocking details of the robbery and its aftermath. 'You have to take your hat off to this country. It has a way of exceeding your worst, most lavish expectations.' But the robbery also presented a political problem for the British and Irish governments. In 2004, the fledgling Northern Ireland Assembly had collapsed, and there were 'talks about talks' to get it up and running again. Indeed, when MI5 detected high levels of phone activity between senior IRA men the night before the robbery, they optimistically — naively — thought it meant an announcement was imminent on the decommissioning of IRA weapons, to break the political deadlock. When it was announced who the likely culprits were, Sinn Fein — the IRA's political wing — complained of a smear on republicans. But as Patterson points out, in one of the few passages where he sounds truly angry, this was a common tactic for Sinn Fein. He reminds us about the brutal murder of Robert McCartney after an argument in a Belfast bar in January 2005, when nobody in the pub — including the future Stormont minister Deirdre Hargey of Sinn Fein — would speak to the police about what happened. Instead, Hargey claimed that reports of IRA involvement in the murder were 'part of the onslaught by the media and governments and political parties to criminalise Sinn Fein and the republican movement'. As Patterson coolly observes: 'There is chutzpah, and there is chutzpah.' • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List Hardly any of the money has been recovered, and only one person was prosecuted for the robbery. That person was … one of the victims, Chris Ward, who was prosecuted on circumstantial evidence that the robbery had been an inside job — the IRA men were so well prepared that someone in the bank must have helped them. The case was abandoned partway through. Patterson attended every day of the trial. The case was clearly not an outstanding example of prosecutorial craft. Phil Flynn, who was vice president of Sinn Fein, took the view that 'there was nobody killed. At the end of the day, it was only money.' But it wasn't only money. The robbery revealed a lot about what was important in Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein was welcomed back into government. And in a world where every conspiracy theorist sees two-tier justice in any outcome they don't like, the aftermath of the robbery provided a real example. The senior IRA man Bobby Storey — believed to be the brains behind the robbery, and 'a great human being' in the words of Gerry Adams — died in June 2020 and his funeral attracted more than 1,500 people, in contravention of Covid regulations. Other people could have no more than 30 at theirs. None of the Sinn Fein politicians who attended were prosecuted, while at a Black Lives Matter protest in Belfast a few weeks earlier, 70 people were fined. Patterson had once planned to write a screenplay of the robbery. I wish he had. It has everything: tension, dark comedy, human interest, big issues and more. But this book will do very nicely in its place. And if the Northern Bank heist was indeed a symbolic robbery, then here is the other symbol. Why did they do it? Because they knew they could get away with it. As Patterson points out: 'Something [else] disappeared in that white van in December 2004 that has never been recovered.' The Northern Bank Job: The Heist and How They Got Away With It by Glenn Patterson (Head of Zeus £16.99 pp272). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
