On Tuesday evening, a small town in Northern Ireland saw its second night of anti-immigration unrest. Ballymena – population 31,000, half an hour north of Belfast – has been thrown into a state of disarray not seen since the acme of the Troubles in the 1970s. Riot police were deployed as hundreds gathered. The crowd launched petrol bombs and bricks at police services, and tried to burn down houses on a central residential street. Protesters were dispersed with a water cannon; at least 15 police officers have been declared injured; windows have been smashed and cars set alight.
It was a predictable escalation of similar unrest on Monday evening. That morning, two 14-year-olds accused of the sexual assault of a teenage girl appeared before Coleraine Magistrates’ Court, speaking through an interpreter in Romanian. (They both deny the charges.)
The day unfolded in a familiar pattern. Crowds gathered peacefully for a vigil at the site of the alleged assault, a vigil that by evening had descended into violence as protesters similarly launched petrol bombs and bricks at police. Jim Allister, the local MP representing the conservative and Protestant Traditional Unionist Voice party, suggested the “very distressing” scenes were a product of unhappiness at “significant demographic change in the area” caused by “unfettered immigration”.
The echoes of very recent history – when ethnic tension broke out on the streets of England last summer – were apparent. Three young girls were murdered at a Taylor Swift dance class in the seaside town of Southport, triggering days of rioting and anti-immigration protests across the country. Hundreds were arrested.
Few could ignore the parallels with Dublin less than a year prior to that. In November 2023 the city was set ablaze after a naturalised Irish citizen of Algerian origin was alleged to have attacked schoolchildren and their teacher in the inner northside. Agitators made their call to arms over encrypted messaging service Telegram: “Everyone bally [balaclava] up, tool up,” a man can be heard in a voice note. “Let’s show the fucking media that we’re not a pushover. That no more foreigners are allowed into this poxy country.”
There are several things that unite the two events: a common rhetorical cause (in Dublin protesters shout “Ireland is full”, in England banners read “we want our country back”); an incoherent, small and angry nativist cohort united by a violent attack on children; and a social media-scape littered with false information that spread faster than the authorities could react to it. In both cases the attacker was incorrectly identified as an “illegal immigrant”.
The deeper social contours are similar, too: these are white working-class areas. A million newspaper columns, books, sociological studies and documentaries have been produced to explain, critique and, in some cases, ventriloquise their rage. An entire language has been generated to accompany this agonised library: left behind, somewheres, broken heartlands, Red Wall, even white working-class itself, a phrase that barely existed before the 1960s, and only gained currency in Britain following the vote to leave the European Union in 2016. The basic, fundamental fact of the matter hasn’t changed since then. An unhappy, alienated white working-class channels its despair into desperate political gambles, or, more bleakly, outright violence.
Ireland and Britain increasingly resemble one another in this respect. In Dublin in particular the demographic change is precipitous: in the year to April 2023, immigration reached a 16-year high of 141,600. One opinion poll conducted that summer by the Business Post/Red C found that 75 per cent of people believed Ireland was accepting too many refugees. The country had long considered itself immune to the worst excesses of national populism but the levels of immigration, combined with the country’s profound housing crisis, have created a tinderbox atmosphere. The riots in November 2023 were only a surprise if you’d stopped paying attention.
Given the agitation just south of the border, we might have expected a cross-pollination event sooner in Northern Ireland. But it was not until the Southport attacks in August 2024 that Belfast saw its own large-scale agitation, in support of the protests across the Irish Sea. Irish tricolours appeared alongside Union flags – both sides of the tradition finally united under a common cause: anti-immigration.
One thing is clear: this mode of civil unrest is not local. What happened in Dublin precipitated last summer’s events in England, as porous social media appeared to turbocharge tensions on both sides of the sea. Many 2024 marches in Belfast were held in solidarity with protesters in England, and were joined by agitators who had travelled north from the Republic. Ballymena is not just half an hour away from Belfast. It is – via X, Facebook and Telegram – just as close to the restless communities scattered across the archipelago. A long summer lies ahead.
[See more: Labour is losing Wales]
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