The County Antrim town of Ballymena endured a second night of rioting on Tuesday, as protestors aimed fireworks and missiles at the police. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) responded with water cannon and baton rounds. Thirty-two officers have been injured in the violence in Ballymena so far, and homes and businesses have been set alight. The PSNI described the attacks on properties as ‘racially motivated’, and the Police Federation claimed its members had ‘prevented a pogrom’. The North Antrim MP, Jim Allister, criticised ‘successive authorities’ for failing to ‘manage integration or address local concerns in the town.
The violence broke out after protestors rallied peacefully at first in the aftermath of an alleged sexual assault against a teenage girl at the weekend. On Monday, two boys, who spoke through a Romanian interpreter, appeared in court charged with attempted rape. This incident followed two similar alleged attacks in recent weeks. Some of the protestors expressed anger that the violence had undermined their cause, while local politicians blamed ‘elements’ from outside the town for much of the disorder.
That homes where foreign nationals were known to live were targeted was a particularly sinister aspect of the violence. In the nearby village of Cullybackey, a Filipino night-shift worker at the Wrightbus factory, which is best known for making London’s iconic Routemaster ‘Boris buses’, had his car destroyed outside his family home. On Tuesday evening, some members of Ballymena’s growing Filipino community, which locals generally regard as unobtrusive and industrious, marked their doors with the flag of the Philippines, and the message: ‘Filipino lives here’.
These signs were poignant reminders of how wanton and indiscriminate the violence has become. Ballymena has similarities to many places across the rest of the UK that have experienced unrest caused by migration over the past two years. Some of the rioters may have come, as claimed, from Belfast and other towns, drawn by the excitement of trouble and coordinated by social media. At the same time, the violence was something of a cry of despair from a community that has been changed radically by immigration and feels like its opinions have been ignored.
Until relatively recently, Ballymena was a prosperous town, with a reputation for being populated by hard-working, thrifty Ulster Scots. During the last decade or so, it experienced rapid deindustrialisation, as major employers left, went bust or downsized. The town’s Michelin plant, which produced its first tyre in 1969, closed in 2018.
Meanwhile, the Gallaher’s tobacco factory finally shut for good in 2017, at the cost of 860 jobs, after 75 years of manufacturing cigarettes. At its prime, the facility, whose operations have moved to Poland, employed over 2,000 people.
Immigration has most seriously affected communities that were already blighted by poverty and other social problems
Many of the town’s remaining large employers, like Moy Park, which makes processed chicken products and is owned by the multinational food producer Pilgrim’s, have turned to migrant labour to fill posts and keep costs low. Some local workers are reluctant to work twelve hour shifts, in unpleasant conditions, but there is still resentment that immigrants are coming to Ballymena to work and occupy housing, while better paid, higher status industrial jobs have disappeared.
The protestors’ allegations against the town’s Roma population are slightly different to the complaints about migrant workers. The violence this week centred on the Clonavon Terrace area, which, in common with other deprived parts of Ballymena, now has a majority of foreign-born residents. About half of the street’s inhabitants identify as Roma. There are allegations that the community’s arrival coincided with an increase in crime in Ballymena and high-profile sex trafficking cases have involved Romanian nationals living in the town.
Like many other parts of the UK, and the island of Ireland, immigration has most seriously affected communities that were often already blighted by poverty and other social problems. The Harryville area, beside Clonavon, was once a tight-knit, working-class neighbourhood. It already struggled with low educational attainment in comparison to other near-by localities, but now 60 per cent of pupils in its local primary school don’t speak English as a first language.
The attacks on the police and the targeting of immigrants’ homes in Ballymena were deplorable and self-destructive. Indeed, alongside the racist aspect to this violence, it has caused damage and disruption to the rioters’ own communities, as well as hampering the authorities’ attempts to provide justice for the sex-attack victim (whom the rallies were supposed to support). Yesterday, Ballymena Protestant Boys, one of the town’s many flute bands, which are linked closely with grassroots loyalist culture, called for protests to stop, because the ensuing trouble was ‘causing chaos’ in the town.
In common with last summer’s immigration riots, the desire to hit out, particularly at blameless individuals who happen to be migrants, is indefensible. That does not mean that the frustrations that underlie these attacks are not real or justifiable. The violence in Ballymena points to another British community that feels powerless to protect its children, uphold its way of life or retain its identity, in the face of changes that have been forced upon it.
Comments