By daylight, Ballymena, a town of 30,000 people in rural County Antrim, bustles with commerce and activity: farmers taking livestock to slaughter while pedestrians cheer on a peloton of cyclists on a training run up the Galgorm Road.
But as dusk falls, the bucolic mood is transformed into something rather more sinister. Marauding gangs of masked youths stalk the streets, barricades are set ablaze and the acrid smell of burning tyres fills the night air.
Police in riot gear, bearing shields and with truncheons drawn, stand guard over a network of back-to-back terraced housing in one of the most deprived quarters of town.
Suddenly a hail of missiles rains down: bricks, masonry, scaffolding poles and bottles. Fireworks shot directly at lines of helmeted police light up the sky and crude petrol bombs explode with a roar of fire on armour-plated Land Rovers. It took water cannon and rounds of plastic bullets to quell the trouble.
And it has been this way on three successive nights this week. By Thursday, disorder had spread to Portadown in County Armagh 40 miles away. Street violence in Northern Ireland, especially in the months of June and July – the so-called ‘marching season’ – is nothing new.
However, the rioting that erupted here in Ballymena has been triggered not by disputes over the route of sectarian parades but by a flashpoint episode given added potency by what is described locally as an ‘endless stream of migrants’.
It had its roots in a peaceful protest organised in support of the family of a local girl who was the victim of an alleged sexual assault.
Two 14-year old boys had earlier appeared in court charged with attempted rape.
The charges were read to the teenagers by a Romanian translator, a tell-tale clue to their origins. A third man, also a foreign national, was later arrested and released after questioning.
Anger at the news boiled over into violence.
Police later described the hijacking of the protest and the subsequent nights of disturbance as nothing less than ‘racially motivated thuggery’.
Dozens of migrant families have been forced to move out, their homes ransacked and torched. One man told how he had only escaped the thugs who broke into his house by hiding in the attic before clambering on to his roof and making his way to safety over a neighbouring property.
On the streets of Ballymena, however, there is a more nuanced explanation of the unrest. While residents condemn the violence they insist it is the consequence of what they call ‘unfettered immigration’.
‘We are not racists and we are not xenophobic but there has been a complete lack of democratic consent,’ says councillor Reuben Glover. ‘Our neighbourhoods have been swamped by migrants which has changed the demographic. The town can’t cope.’
Residents complain that they have been kept in the dark about what they call ‘undocumented migration’, mostly involving people of Roma heritage.
They claim these new arrivals have not just brought in cultural differences but criminality, fear and tension. The leader of a local Loyalist band, who declined to give his name, said his car had been targeted by vandals. ‘A gang of boys jumped up and down on the roof till it caved in, broke all the windows and slashed the seats,’ he says. ‘It had to be written off.’
It is impossible to walk far on Clonavon Terrace and its adjoining streets without hearing similar stories: laundry drying in the sun stolen from washing lines, cars and homes broken into, girls and mothers propositioned for sex by young men.
They cite numerous examples of anti-social behaviour: rubbish dumped in the nearby River Braid, thefts from food and clothes banks and shops, and youths urinating and defecating in the street.
One local told me that a group of boys took to gathering in the evenings, brandishing machetes. ‘It’s intimidating,’ he said.
Another told of an elderly neighbour who had not left her home for two years because it meant passing the doors of houses containing Roma migrants. ‘They jostle and push her and she became frightened. Now she won’t go out.’
One claim I heard repeated time and again this week was that unscrupulous landlords have turned many houses into multi-occupancy properties with up to 15 migrants living at a single address. This, they say, has contributed hugely to local tension.
In the absence of hard facts, it is easy for rumours such as these to take root. But as someone who reported from Ulster for this newspaper at the height of the Troubles in the 1980s, the stories I heard and the savagery I witnessed this week are a horrifying illustration of how mass migration can destroy social cohesion going back generations.
If it can happen in the pleasant town of Ballymena, it can surely happen on the streets of England, Scotland and Wales where communities have been asked to absorb ever increasing numbers of foreigners. In the wake of the violence that spread across swathes of mainland Britain last summer after the Southport attacks, the sight of people fleeing their homes is chilling.
It is reminiscent of the outbreak of sectarian conflict which saw Protestants and Catholics burned out of their homes in Belfast and brought the British Army on to the Province’s streets in 1969.
But Ballymena is not Belfast. And despite the town’s location in the heart of Northern Ireland’s Bible belt – in 2005 the council banned the screening of the Hollywood film Brokeback Mountain because it featured a gay relationship – locals insist many of those who have settled here have been welcomed. They point to a large Filipino community and to Czech and Portuguese incomers as examples of nationalities which have been successfully integrated.
All the same, there is something uneasy about the steps these same migrants have had to take to prevent the mob destroying their homes. Some marked their doors with Union flags or identified their nationality, while others displayed yellow posters with lettering in black capitals saying: ‘Locals Live Here.’ Those who fail to do so risk having their property razed. The destruction which exploded this week was all the more horrifying because it so often involved neighbours turning on each other.
And even Filipinos, many of whom displayed signs reading ‘Filipino lives here’, alongside their country’s flag, were not safe. Filipino mechanic Kevin Rous had his car set alight and his home damaged by the fire.
In the midst of such mindless violence, however, there were acts of kindness. Locals set up a GoFundMe page to help Rous get back on his feet.
This, of course, is the trouble when mob rule takes over. Anyone with the wrong-coloured skin becomes an enemy.
In street after street it was easy to spot the home of a migrant. They were either blackened from flames or trashed, with doors hanging from their hinges and windows broken.
It’s remarkable that there have been no fatalities. One Slovak couple told me they were sitting in front of the television when a child’s scooter was thrown with such force against their window it ended up in their living room.
Warned of approaching trouble, Bulgarian factory worker Kolyo Kovchiv, 47, fled his home and watched aghast on social media as it was invaded by thugs who livestreamed the episode on TikTok. Surveying the ruins of his home the following day, with a shattered TV at his feet, the father of two, whose daughter was born in Ballymena, said: ‘These are just things. What would have happened if we had been in the house? Where will we go? I have been here ten years. I don’t know but I can never come back here.’
His son Dobri, 15, said he was heartbroken: ‘I love going to school here, it’s all I’ve got.’ But he was, he said, the target of bullies and racists. ‘They tell me to get the f*** out and go back to your f****** country. But I feel more Irish than Bulgarian. Where should I go?’
Rumours were spread and amplified on social media. Many members of the Roma community had been bussed out before trouble erupted on Monday evening. But when a post went up the following day saying they were being accommodated in the local hotel where I was staying, the management alerted police and put a statement on TikTok saying it was untrue.
A local bus company took similar steps after it was wrongly accused of transporting migrants away from the town. ‘They feared that, if they had not, their depot and fleet would have been petrol bombed,’ I was told.
No such action could prevent a leisure centre 20 miles away in the coastal town of Larne becoming a target after claims migrant families were being held there. Masked men set it alight but by then the migrants had been relocated elsewhere. When daylight came after the first night of rioting the streets were still littered with missiles. Some migrants were back, gingerly picking through what was left of their homes to collect heirlooms that had not been smashed. Others who had stayed put saw graffiti smeared on gable walls – ‘Roma rapists out’ – and began packing their bags. One couple was in such a rush to leave, they abandoned a child’s pram.
They weren’t the only ones on the move. Bridget, a young British single mother, was packing her car on Kinhilt Street. ‘I’m leaving,’ she told me. ‘It’s not safe. I’ve got a 14-year-old daughter. It is horrible for her here.
‘It’s like we’ve been invaded by foreigners. I’m sorry if that makes me sound a racist because I’m not. It’s just that our world has changed and we didn’t ask it to be changed and no one told us it would be.’
To many, no doubt, the situation that unfolded – and continues to unfold in Ulster this week – is reminiscent of the prejudice and bigotry of a bygone age.
But in Ballymena they say it is not intolerance that lies behind the wanton damage but a form of deception. ‘It is a cry of despair,’ one community leader tells me.
According to figures produced by local MP Jim Allister, only five out of 50 houses in the Clonavon area he recently canvassed were occupied by locals. Census figures for the network of streets where the trouble broke out show foreign nationals make up 57 per cent of the population.
And this, remember, is a small town in Northern Ireland, not inner-city London.
What is harder to establish is the number of Roma that locals say have ‘flocked’ to the town. This, they insist, is because they are ‘undocumented’, many arriving overland via the Irish Republic (thanks to the EU’s freedom of movement), where they are waved across the Ulster border with no checks.
The influx of migrants is also said to have been accelerated by more asylum seekers being dispersed to Northern Ireland by the government as it takes advantage of the Province’s low-cost housing.
‘They don’t go on the electoral register, they don’t have National Insurance numbers and if they can’t find legitimate employment they resort to other means,’ says the band leader. ‘Once one group was established here, others followed, and the community has grown.
‘No one knows how many there are, because one property can contain several households.’
Residents claim the sheer volume of incoming migrants has put huge pressure on public services, such as GP surgeries, making it harder to get appointments.
While condemning the mindless hooliganism that exploded here – which saw 41 police officers injured – the people of Ballymena say it was motivated not by bigotry but powerlessness.
‘The causes of this unrest have been bubbling under for years but we are not listened to,’ says councillor Glover. ‘Instead when we complain of men hanging around intimidating locals we are the ones branded racist.’
What is happening here is a disturbing example of what can happen when public sentiment is ignored. The tolerance threshold for mass migration is clearly finite.
Having spent so long trying to end one form of community hatred – between Catholics and Protestants – it is ironic that Ulster’s experiment with mass migration is in danger of unleashing a new breed of civil unrest.
If the politicians cannot grasp this, then the rule of the mob will not be confined to Ballymena.