What's behind the Ballymena riots?

The Northern Irish town of Ballymena is reeling after a fourth night of anti-immigrant violence, and a total of 63 police officers injured and at least 15 people arrested.

The riots broke out on Monday, after initially peaceful protests over the court appearance of two Romanian-speaking teenagers charged with the attempted rape of a local girl. "Masked rioters hurled petrol bombs, fireworks and masonry at police", said the Financial Times. On Tuesday night, "homes and businesses were damaged and cars set alight" and police responded with "water cannon and baton rounds". Some local residents "put signs on their homes, indicating their nationality" in a desperate bid to avoid being targeted as "foreigners".

What did the commentators say?

"Racism in 2025 bears a startling resemblance to sectarianism in 1969," said Suzanne Breen in the Belfast Telegraph. Ballymena's streets look "like a scene from the start of the Troubles, when families were burnt out of their homes because of their religion". These rioting "thugs" are engaging in a similar "collective punishment"; their "racist attacks" must "be called out for what they are".

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Claims that the town's "demographic balance" has been destabilised are redolent of the language used in the past when Catholic numbers rose. Yet Stormont figures show that only 3.5% of Northern Ireland's population is from an ethnic minority, compared to 18% in England and Wales, and 13% in Scotland. "Northern Ireland remains the whitest and least diverse part of the UK."

This sort of thing is inevitably a "Rorschach test", said Brian O'Neill on Slugger O'Toole. "It's like every side watches the same footage and comes away with a completely different film in their heads." Some see "community defence", others see a "racist mob", then "there's the rest of us in the middle going, 'WTF?'"

The anger "isn't just bubbling among one community", said Rory Carroll in The Guardian. The unrest is "bringing Catholics and Protestants together in combined rioting against the foreigners" – a pattern that fits with the Belfast anti-immigration riots last August, "where you had loyalists with British flags marching alongside Dublin anti-migrant activists who had the Irish tricolour". You don't see that often in Northern Ireland.

And the sense of unrest goes beyond Northern Ireland, too, said Finn McRedmond in The New Statesman. It echoes the riots in Dublin in 2023 and the last summer's riots in Southport, which also triggered that "large scale agitation" in Belfast. The porous boundaries of social media seem to "turbocharge tensions on both sides of the sea".

The prospect of "civil war" in the UK once seemed "overblown", said Annabel Denham in The Telegraph, but that's changed as people reach "the end of their tether with illegal migration". If the "white working class feel they are constantly being expected to sacrifice their culture" and identity, in order to "celebrate those of immigrants", it "may not be long before they revolt".

What next?

"It is hard to see where this ends," said Connor Gillies on Sky News. Many fear this week's unrest is "just the beginning" and could go on for weeks, potentially spreading to other parts of Northern Ireland or beyond.

Speaking after the third night of violence on Thursday, Liam Kelly, the chair of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland, said the police response to the riots so far had "undoubtedly saved lives" and prevented "a pogrom with consequences too painful to contemplate".