BALLYMENA, Northern Ireland — Elena no longer walks up her own road to do the shopping in her adopted hometown of Ballymena. She’s afraid even to go out her front door, past neighbors’ homes with newly shattered windows and fire-blackened brickwork.
Since masked men and youths started laying nightly siege to her small residential street in a hunt for foreign faces, the Romanian immigrant has kept her lights off after dark — and a fire extinguisher and a packed suitcase by her front door.
“I don’t know how much longer I can live here. Which is what they want, to make me run away,” Elena, a 32-year-old social worker, told POLITICO in her living room with boarded-up windows on Ballymena’s Clonavon Terrace. Nearby, homes for immigrants from Romania, Bulgaria and the Philippines have already been attacked and now lie empty.
At least 14 immigrant families have fled their homes, mostly from Ballymena, and received emergency accommodation elsewhere, according to Northern Ireland’s public housing agency. More than 60 police officers have suffered injuries in street skirmishes with rioters.
Such racism-fueled intimidation and violence has become a recurring problem in Northern Ireland, the least ethnically diverse corner of the United Kingdom, where a three-decade conflict between British unionists and Irish nationalists known as “The Troubles” came to a negotiated end a quarter-century ago.
Since then, immigration from outside Britain or Ireland has grown from virtually nothing to represent around 6.5 percent of the population.
Newcomers from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa have found housing with the least difficulty in the poorest quarters of the British unionist community, where outlawed paramilitary gangs spent decades killing Catholics in a bid to keep “outsiders” from taking root in their Union Jack-marked turf.
Those so-called loyalist groups, principally the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), killed hundreds of Catholic civilians before calling a joint 1994 cease-fire. But they retain a militant and xenophobic hold today over many working-class Protestant communities, where the next generation of alienated youth sporadically lashes out at new targets, most notably in Brexit-related turmoil in 2021 and against immigrants last summer.
What cannot be tolerated
This cycle resumed Monday, when two 14-year-old boys appeared in court to be charged with the attempted oral rape of a Ballymena girl. Both boys, speaking with help from a Romanian interpreter, denied the charges.
That evening, hundreds of protesters rallied at a nearby parking lot, in the words of the girl’s father, “to show our anger at what cannot and will not be tolerated in this town.”
While the family and others called for the protest to be peaceful, scores of men and youths leaving the rally started attacking nearby homes identified with immigrants. Many of the attackers donned masks to make it harder for police video footage to identify them.
Northern Ireland’s overstretched police force spent the past four nights bottling up those rioters in Ballymena, but immigrants and police came under attack in several other staunchly unionist towns and at least three districts in Belfast, the capital.
As happened during last summer’s racist attacks, Northern Ireland police chief Jon Boutcher is seeking reinforcements from other U.K. police forces. About 80 officers from Police Scotland have already arrived and will hit the streets this weekend.
Leaders of Northern Ireland’s cross-community government — the crisis-prone cornerstone of the region’s 1998 peace accord — sought Friday to project an air of unity as they held a previously scheduled summit with the Irish government and other regional U.K. administrations. But behind the scenes, tensions are rising again between the principal power-sharing parties, Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a potentially volatile combination of extremes.
First Minister Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin repeated her call for one of her DUP colleagues, Communities Minister Gordon Lyons, to resign over his social media posts Wednesday identifying an emergency shelter for immigrants fleeing Ballymena — a sports center in Lyons’ own constituency. A 100-strong masked mob soon attacked the center, terrifying those inside but injuring nobody.
“Four nights in a row, what we’ve seen on our streets is totally unacceptable. I hope that we all stand strong in facing it down and saying no to racism in our society,” O’Neill said.
But back in Ballymena, a traditional DUP stronghold, a Facebook-based community group is urging locals to register their properties as occupied by natives — and therefore not targets for the vandals.
Elena, who didn’t want her last name used because she doesn’t want to be identifiable on social media, told POLITICO she wants to put a Union Jack on her door in hopes of protecting herself this weekend. A native-born neighbor is trying to source one for her.
“I’m a home carer. I probably look after some of the grandparents, or aunts or uncles, of these hoods going around smashing up people’s homes,” she said. “I shouldn’t have to wrap myself in a flag to live here.”
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