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.
