Tomás Ó Flatharta

“Christian” charity has disappeared from North Antrim.

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Gordon Lyons Has to Go – by Eamonn McCann

The scenes we’re witnessing in Ballymena, Larne and elsewhere are vile and indefensible attempted pogroms. They should be utterly condemned by all.

These attacks haven’t occurred out of thin air, however.

In a context of community frustration at deprivation, waiting lists and crumbling public services, far right agitators are spreading racist lies on social media to blame migrants, and Unionist politicians have deliberately fanned the flames of their hate.

Last night, the DUP Minister for Communities Gordon Lyons posted the location of people sheltering from riots:

“It has been brought to my attention that a number of individuals were temporarily moved to Larne Leisure Centre in the early hours of the morning following the disturbances in Ballymena.”

The leisure centre was attacked later that evening – motivated by sheer racism. Gordon Lyons should resign immediately.

Other Unionist politicians have been whipping up anti-immigrant rhetoric.

On Monday Paul Frew, also DUP, went on the attack about immigration in a session on violence against women, and also referenced the case of sexual assault which sparked the racist riots in Ballymena. Frew also railed about immigration in Ballymena in a debate on the 20th May.

The TUV’s Timothy Gaston beat the anti-immigration drum on that same day: “Migration puts pressure on hospitals, schools and housing: that is a fact.”

This is the racist playbook on display. It blames migrants and minorities for the problems in our society. Migrants didn’t underfund the health service, minorities don’t hike up rents, asylum seekers don’t keep wages down. These problems are caused by the super rich, by landlords, and by politicians who protect them

Unionist politicians bear serious responsibility for the hateful scenes of recent days. They dog-whistled and whipped up racist sentiments. Loyalist paramilitaries and far right agitators took the next logical step, attacking ordinary people and making them fear for their lives.

Don’t be taken in by the DUP, the TUV and the far right. Stand up for humanity in a time of fear and chaos.

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A bad habit in Ireland – Public Representatives Pandering to Racist Mobs

The DUP’s Gordon Lyons is not the first Irish public figure who has aligned himself with “legitimate” fears about where immigrants live, and he will not be the last. Maybe the racist wildfire spreading from Ballymena and Larne to Portadown will convince all on the left that there are no justifiable reasons for marching against hostels hotels and leisure centres that accommodate people who have come to Ireland from different parts of the world.

In the 26 county bit of Ireland similar mass racist protests have been endorsed by many Sinn Féin public representatives.

In the 6 county bit of Ireland Sinn Féin have joined calls for the resignation of Stormont-Racist Minister Gordon Lyons – a welcome development. DUP leader, the supposedly moderate East Belfast MP Gavin Robinson, says Lyons will stay put – and accuses Sinn Féin Stormont ministers of bending to pressure from their political rivals the SDLP.

On the BBC NI programme “The View” panellists Claire Hanna MP (SDLP South Belfast) and journalist Allison Morris were visibly shocked giving viewers eye-witness accounts of terrified residents putting Union Jack regalia on their windows to deter racist pogromists – in the desperate hope that only people deemed not to be “locals” would be driven out of Ballymena. Hanna called this scene “dystopian” – an imagined world or society in which people lead dehumanized, fearful lives. This is a sinister historic reminder of the consolidation of Nazi racist rule in early 1930’s Germany.

We are not at that point today in the six county bit of Ireland – the police and numerous other establishment figures state that the pogroms in Ballymena, Larne and Portadown are racist.

BBC News Report :

In a press conference on Thursday afternoon, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Chief Constable said families hid in attics and wardrobes during violent disorder in Ballymena this week.

Jon Boutcher described the violence as “racist”, adding “the people who are threatening families who are different to them – that is racism”.

Mr Boutcher said after a peaceful protest was “hijacked” on Monday evening, police and the fire service had to help families “who have done nothing wrong”.

He added that: “We stand absolutely shoulder to shoulder with the diverse communities in Northern Ireland.

“These bigots and racists will not win the day.”

Boutcher’s description of a hijacked “peaceful protest” is misplaced, to put it mildly. The protest was called after news spread about two underage boys charged with child abuse crimes, who needed the assistance of Romanian language interpreters in a court. This narrative was based on constantly recycled far-right lies about immigrants. In this sense, the incident was no different to the November 2023 racist riots in Dublin’s O’Connell Street area when false racist stories were spread about a horrific stabbing incident at Parnell Square. At the moment, we do not know the full details about the two underage boys charged in Ballymena – but we do know this “peaceful protest” stank of double standards. The six county state has a terrible record dealing with child abuse crimes – and many hoped it would be capable of holding a credible investigation into alleged abuse crimes performed by former DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and his wife Eleanor. At the moment the Donaldson trial is seriously delayed because Lady Donaldson is claiming she is unfit to attend the court. No “peaceful protests” have occurred over this case.

There is a long-standing deep-rooted connection between far-right racism and Orange Order sectarianism in the six county bit of Ireland.

The following two articles explain the context, coming at the problem from different political angles.

John Meehan June 13 2025

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Riots in Ballymena following anti-immigration protest…

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Riots in Ballymena following anti-immigration protest…Slugger O’Toole

Riots broke out in Ballymena last night following allegations of a serious sexual assault on a local teenage girl over the weekend. Two 14-year-old Romanian boys have since appeared in court in connection with the incident. That the police has arrested and charged the alleged perpetrators does not seem to be enough for the locals.

The fallout has been swift and violent. At least four homes were set alight and completely destroyed, with the flames spreading to adjacent properties. In a separate incident later that evening, a car was torched in Cullybackey, likely not a coincidence. It doesn’t take a forensic profiler to suspect those homes may have housed members of the Roma community.

Let’s not beat around the bush: this looks like good old-fashioned scapegoating. The kind that erupts when anger meets prejudice. People won’t talk about the hundred crimes committed by locals; they’ll zero in on the one committed by someone without a North Antrim accent.

Ballymena, according to the most recent census, remains over 96% white. As for other ethnic groups, well, the number of Arabs in town wouldn’t fill a Honda Jazz, never mind a mosque. The Roma number, however, stands out, with more than every other ethnic group combined.

Why? A look back offers a clue. In 1998, there was a similar flare-up, and local reporting pointed to the influx of Roma workers recruited for food processing jobs in the area.

So yes, while it’s tempting to write this off as another outburst from the far right, there’s usually more bubbling underneath. Tensions like this don’t just come from nowhere, they’re often rooted in deeper issues around housing allocation, job competition, and a general sense of being left behind.

That doesn’t excuse the violence, but it is useful to know the full picture, even if it is grievances being exploited by right-wing elements. At the moment, social media is full of posts from a weird alignment of Loyalists and the Irish far right. Weird bedfellows indeed.

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The socialist writer Richard Seymour knows this part of the world very well.
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Ballymena – Richard Seymour

How do you get a fifty pence piece out of a Ballymena man’s hand? With a spanner. That little witticism, skewering the famous Presbyterian dourness and self-interest of the town, used to crack everyone up. I always found the reputation exaggerated. Apart from the provincial self-regard of the ‘city of seven towers’ — which was neither a city nor had seven towers in it, but had two bag shawpin santers (big shopping centres) — it was about the same as anywhere else in county Antrim.You see, the ‘Troubles’ instituted a kind of armed patriarchy on the housing estates. The more respectable, middle-class areas were usually spared this form of governance. In Protestant areas, they could repose their trust in the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Orange Order. But the working-class estates were often policed either by the Loyalists or the Provos. These were not equivalent situations: the Catholic estates were run by paramilitaries out of a certain necessity and in spite of their gangsterism, whereas the state existed for the Prods. Nonetheless, Loyalists had their own contempt for the police, whom they were apt to regard as traitors. ‘Black bastards,’ they called them. And if the paramilitaries didn’t run your street, they might nonetheless take an interest in enforcing social order with the odd punishment beating, kneecapping, tarring-and-feathering or extrajudicial execution. This incentivised, for those unwilling to be involved with the violent bampots but unavoidably in their radius, a certain machismo, a hard-bitten refusal to be impressed, and a phlegmatic, self-preserving cynicism. In that respect, Ballymena was not unusual. At the same time, one had to shield oneself behind an exaggerated, unthreatening civility to get on with people who might have very different ideas about which nation-state the province rightly belonged to. This was achieved by making everything ‘wee’, diminutive, cute. Everything was ‘wee’. Your name was ‘wee’, a sausage was ‘wee’, your house was ‘wee’. ‘That’s a quare wee house.’ ‘Just put your wee name on that wee piece of paper, love.’ The province, best of all, was ‘wee’. ‘Our wee country.’ ‘Sure it’s only a minority ruining it for everyone else.’ A lamentable cultural excrescence of the post-Troubles scene is just this tendency to turn ‘wee-ness’ into a commodity, as in Derry Girls, or that repugnantly sentimental Kenneth Branagh film. In that, too, Ballymena played its part.The thing is, the ‘Troubles’ afforded plenty of opportunity for excitement, for those who wanted it. Life could be depressed and dismal, but every now and then the call went out for a wider mobilisation of the citizenry. ‘Mon da fuck boys, here we fuckin go.’ And in a largely Prod town like Ballymena — which, I’ll have you know, has the distinction of having once banned the Electric Light Orchestra for fear of ‘the four Ds: Drink, Drugs, Devil and Debauchery’, and blocked the screening of Brokeback Mountain in case anyone got any ideas — that meant you took the cue from the UVF or the UDA, or one of those acronymic death squads. I recall the excitement among the teenage boys on the estates during the Drumcree conflict. Loyalist paramilitaries and their associates shut down much of the country with riots, hijackings and arson for the right of Orange Order men to march down the Catholic Garvaghy Road. A breakaway from the UVF led by Billy Wright had embarked on a spate of murders of Catholic civilians. The more criminalised boys, though none had any paramilitary affiliations, were ganting for a chance to wrap a scarf around their face and hurl petrol bombs or rocks at the police. The politics of Orange supremacy authorised their recreational violence, even though some of them might have disavowed such politics in other contexts.In the long diminuendo since the Good Friday Agreement, there have been periodic flashpoints of sectarian grievance politics, riots, murders, offence taken at ‘fenian bastards’ walking to school through Protestant areas, and so on. But there has always been a potential, as the reserves of feeling are slowly drained from the national question, for a new mutation of nationalist politics. Many in the Loyalist paramilitaries always had white-supremacist or neo-Nazi connections, and took to terrorising Chinese minorities in Belfast and elsewhere. The BNP sought in its time to leverage these anti-immigrant possibilities, as did Britain First leader Paul Golding when he and his gang visited Ballymena in 2018. That potential materialised in last year’s racist riots across England and Northern Ireland, the latter with the participation of Irish racists, and now erupts in Ballymena.The Ballymena bampots, it transpires, were deeply offended to discover that a couple of adolescents being prosecuted for attempted rape in Ballymena required a Romanian translator in court. They did not show up for any of the other outrages against women and girls, of course. If people in Northern Ireland rioted every time there was a sexual assault, they’d never have a day’s peace. At least four or five people make a police complaint about sexual assault every day, about a fifth of the total number of assaults that are estimated to actually take place. Northern Ireland has some of the worst rates of femicide and domestic abuse in Europe, no doubt in part a legacy of armed patriarchy. If sexual violence led to riots, the place would burn to the ground. The towns would smolder and the countryside would reek of scorched mutton and Free Presbyterians.Perhaps it should burn to the ground. But rape alone does not meet the threshold. As Liam Neeson could tell you, there must be a an aggravating factor. The offender must in some specific way be thought to embody the evil. The victim’s family had organised a protest in Clonavon Terrace near the town centre, where the alleged assault took place. This is where the migrant population in Ballymena is concentrated. The reporting is respectfully discreet as to the politics of the protest. The Belfast Telegraph alludes only to its ‘good faith’, for example. Regardless of their intentions, it was always clear where this would go. The Unionists, and particularly the DUP, had been opportunistically agitating for some time on ‘illegal immigration’. The DUP had pushed a private members’ bill scapegoating asylum seekers for pressures on basic services. Paul Frew, the assembly member representing Ballymena, has played his part in this. The ensuing racist riots, smashing windows, kicking in doors, burning people out of their homes, the attack on a Filipino man’s home miles away in Culleybackey, the spiteful voyeurism of locals, though an entirely predictable reflux of the incitements of rightist Unionism — all this is now predictably deplored by the same spokespeople. Yet it is deplored in a very particular way, as action that detracts from ‘very serious concerns’. I well remember that style of grudging disparagement, as when Loyalist mayhem was regretted more for giving the Republicans the opportunity to appear hard done by than for its more immediate effects. They do not hesitate to underline, as Frew now does, that ‘people are living in fear‘. By this, of course, they do not mean the migrant communities weathering a moral panic that they have whipped up. Nor do they mean the women and children regularly subject to violence, sexual or otherwise, in the six counties. They mean the people terrorising migrants. They’re the victimised, the put upon. As I’ve said before, the only kinds of riots that are ever treated with such solicitousness, such strenuous attempts to ‘understand’, such charitable interpretation — are race riots.

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A correspondent, Connor B, asked an excellent question.

It is addressed in a follow-up blog article : Racism: The socialism of Fools; Racist Cancer Spreading from Ballymena in Ireland. https://tomasoflatharta.com/2025/06/14/racism-the-socialism-of-fools-racist-cancer-spreading-from-ballymena-in-ireland/

From Seanin Graham’s Irish Times Report “Cornelia Amarei from Romania said it was the first time in her seven years living in the street that she put a Union flag in her home.

“We were told it would protect us from any more attacks,” she told The Irish Times.

They were trying to keep her eight-year-old grandson, who is autistic, safe.

“He needs routine so we can’t move from here. We put his earphones on him at a room at the back of the house,” said Ms Amarei, who works at a manufacturing company in the town.

Pre-printed black and white signs stating “Locals Live Here” were stuck on front doors throughout the town by Wednesday evening.

Social media was awash with disinformation about immigration figures and the impact on public services. One Facebook group, with more than 5,000 followers, urged people to share addresses of “locals” they wanted to protect – and of those they wanted to target.

“It is akin to something from 1930s Germany,” said North Antrim Sinn Féin MLA, Philip McGuigan.”

JM June 14 2025