An effigy of a boat filled with migrants, placed on top of a bonfire and set alight. Homes set on fire during a spasm of riots. Displaced families fleeing as angry mobs hurled Molotov cocktails.
This drumbeat of anti-immigrant episodes has taken place over the last five weeks in Northern Ireland. But the images have also brought to mind darker moments in the history of the territory, where fire was long used to intimidate and force out people seen by some as outsiders.
The target of this most recent wave of violence is different from those of the sectarian attacks that defined this land during the Troubles. That decades-long conflict was between the region’s hard-line Protestant Loyalists, who believed Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom, and Irish Catholic nationalists, who wanted the territory to become part of the Republic of Ireland.
But the violence shares a common message: You are not welcome here. If you won’t leave, we may make you.
“Territorialism in Northern Ireland is still embedded — and not only embedded, it’s being patrolled by armed groups,” said Duncan Morrow, a politics professor at Ulster University in Belfast. “Northern Ireland as a society escalates extremely rapidly, because so much of this is already in the whole way society’s organized.”
The town of Ballymena, about 30 miles from Belfast, is sometimes called the “buckle” of Northern Ireland’s Protestant Bible Belt. The most recent violence erupted there after two 14-year-old boys were charged with the attempted oral rape of a local girl on June 7. The two boys, who the BBC reported spoke in court through a Romanian translator, denied the charges.
The night after the boys appeared in court, a peaceful vigil for the girl in Ballymena spiraled into a riot, targeted at members of the Roma community in the Clonavon Terrace area. For six consecutive nights, more violence broke out across the region.
Rioters in Ballymena burned several homes, many of them belonging to immigrant families. Masked gangs in Larne, about 20 miles east, set fire to a leisure center that had been temporarily used as a shelter for those who had been displaced. And angry mobs bore down on immigrant housing in Portadown in County Armagh, where landlords urged residents to temporarily relocate until the threat had quieted.
Since then, 21 families have been placed in temporary housing for shelter and safety as a result of the attacks, according to the Northern Ireland Housing Executive.
A vast majority of those who live in Northern Ireland do not endorse violence. Still, last month’s harrowing scenes were a reminder that the area’s embers of riot and tribalism are still flammable.
Not far from the facades of charred homes in Ballymena is the former site of a Catholic primary school, which was set alight in a 2005 attack that the police described as sectarian. Nearby, Our Lady of Harryville Catholic Church, since demolished, was a lightning rod for arson attacks both before and after the Good Friday Agreement, the 1998 peace deal that largely ended the Troubles.
In recent years, a relatively modest trickle of immigrants has become the subject of hostility both in the Irish Republic and in Northern Ireland, which remains the least diverse area of the United Kingdom by a significant margin. On an island that was defined for centuries by outward emigration, the demographic shift has been highly visible, especially in poorer, working-class communities where many immigrant families land.
“The geography of it is, if you like, a little bit more like 1969 when you had odd Catholics living on the streets,” said Dominic Bryan, a professor at Queens University in Belfast who studies conflict.
In August 1969, Loyalist mobs attacked and burned Catholic homes in Belfast and Derry, forcing thousands of families to flee. Today, Professor Bryan said, immigrant families are obvious minority targets on the otherwise largely homogeneous streets of the North.
“They’ve become very exposed,” he said.
Further agitating the scene are various criminal and paramilitary elements on its periphery. Ballymena remains a locus for dissident, Loyalist paramilitaries, some of whom have regrouped as criminal syndicates. Court cases indicate the town is also believed by the police to have been used as a base for a Romanian organized crime gang, which traffics in drugs and prostitution.
The police have long accused Loyalist paramilitary groups of fomenting unrest. Last summer, officials in Northern Ireland and the Republic blamed those actors for facilitating widespread anti-immigrant violence in Dublin, as well as in Belfast and other parts of Northern Ireland.
Officials have not pinned the arson attacks in June on Loyalist gangs, but they said they were probing possible connections. Experts say much of the recent disorder was organized online, where some Loyalist factions have adopted far-right, anti-immigrant language in recent years.
Last Thursday, overlapping ideologies were visible in the effigy of the migrant boat set alight on top of a celebratory bonfire for the Twelfth of July, an annual Unionist commemoration of a Protestant king’s military victory over a Catholic king. Banners on the bonfire read “Stop the boats” and “Veterans before refugees.”
This kind of nativist sentiment has historically found fertile ground in Ballymena, the land of Ian Paisley, the firebrand Protestant preacher who shaped the hard-line politics of contemporary Unionism, the movement to remain part of the United Kingdom. As paramilitary groups have retreated into more entrenched, isolated corners, they have maintained a cultural and social hold, particularly on disenfranchised youth.
“Soft-power paramilitarism is huge in these areas,” Professor Morrow said. “Most of the time they operate through their more nebulous social control, with young people and the whole cultural thing. That’s why it becomes so difficult to pinpoint.”
To walk the streets last month around Clonavon Terrace in Ballymena — an interface between what were the traditionally Protestant and Catholic areas of the town — was to rewind Northern Ireland’s clock. Union Jacks and red-and-white Ulster flags were ubiquitous, plastered against doors, flying out of windows or draped as garden ornaments.
When a photographer and I stopped outside a home, draped in British and Ulster memorabilia, a young man stuck his head out of a window, demanding to know who we were, what we were doing and why. Further down the block, I glanced back and saw that the man had stepped outside into his garden and was silently watching us until we turned the corner.
The suspicion toward outsiders was palpable at riots in Ballymena on June 11 and on the following day in Portadown, where protesters demanded the identification cards of journalists and confronted strangers about their politics. In Portadown, a peaceful protest slowly dispersed, but spectators lingered, expecting violence. Sure enough, small groups of masked youth began lobbing bricks at the many police officers on site.
Earlier, a man in a neatly pressed shirt and dark trench coat had watched the crowd. “There’s serious concerns around uncontrolled immigration and indeed illegal immigration,” said the man, Jonathan Buckley, an assemblyman with the Democratic Unionist Party from Portadown. But, he added, “violence is completely intolerable.”
Intolerable, perhaps — but also a shared spectacle. Across Northern Ireland’s tumult, from the Ballymena riots to the burning of migrant effigies and bonfires last week, one constant was the throngs of onlookers. Tucked behind and among police lines, they came with beer cans and with their children, eager for nightfall.
In Ballymena last month, a group pointed out cues, as if watching a stage play they had seen before. The police would charge here; the crowd would move here; the unmarked van would move here; the Molotov cocktails would come from here.
The night progressed accordingly. As the sun began to set over the Harryville Bridge, the pregnant tension exploded with a single bottle, hurtling across the sky and smacking against a police riot shield.
Ali Watkins covers international news for The Times and is based in Belfast.
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