THE County Antrim town of Ballymena in Northern Ireland is in flames amid the worst outbreak of attempted racist pogroms since those stirred up by the far right in the wake of the Southport schoolgirls’ stabbings last August.
The hate-filled attacks on ethnic minorities and immigrants unleashed in this medium-sized town – population just over 30,000 – have spread to other towns and villages as nights go by, including Larne, Portadown, Coleraine and parts of Belfast and Derry cities.
People who have settled in Ballymena, particularly since the 1990s ceasefires, cower in their homes, barricade front doors with sofas and hide in their bedrooms and attics as thugs break down those doors, smash windows and try to set fire to homes with children in them.
Amid arson attacks and assaults on men, women and children, we see a grisly re-invention of the Biblical story of the Passover, in this former heartland of the late “hellfire-and-damnation” sectarian leader the Rev Ian Paisley. In the book of Exodus, God allegedly is said to have told the Jews to smear their doors with the blood of a sacrificial lamb so he would “pass over” their homes while smiting the Egyptians with his wrath, murdering their first born.
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In this real-life 2025 version, people who made Ballymena their home, with their kids making friends with the children of parents born locally, are posting national flags on their doors – sometimes British Union flags but accompanied by the flags of the Philippines, Bulgaria, Poland etc – trying to avoid being mistaken for being Romanian.
This is because the latter were the primary targets, at least initially, of the hate-filled rioters. What led to Ballymena being projected on to the world’s TV screens? The immediate background was the alleged sexual assault on a 14-year-old girl in the town and the arrest of two boys of Romanian background, also 14, who denied the allegation against them.
An estimated 2500 people gathered in a peaceful protest at this vile sexual assault – but then a breakaway crowd of several hundred went on the rampage, launching arson attacks on homes and cars, smashing the doors and windows of the homes of immigrants and ethnic minorities. There was also prolonged rioting, with masonry and firebombs thrown at police officers.
Underlying those immediate triggers is the worldwide phenomenon of decades of disappointment and betrayal by mainstream capitalist parties of what we’ve dubbed the “extreme centre”, who carry out neoliberal capitalist assaults on working-class communities, and the failure of the dominant leaderships of the mass organisations of the working class to adequately confront this with a fighting, inspiring socialist alternative, leading to the upsurge of far-right formations.
We see that with the rise of Donald Trump in the US; the growth of far right and even fascist forces around the AFD in Germany and Marine Le Pen’s French equivalent; and of course, the multi-millionaire and arch-Thatcherite Nigel Farage in Britain.
Capitalist rule, regardless of party label, has failed working-class people worldwide and, in the absence of mass socialist forces, into the vacuum steps the evangels of red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism, dressed up in populist slogans and ruthless racist scapegoating of immigrants and ethnic minorities.
Northern Ireland is by no means immune from these trends. In the South Republic over the last few years, far-right forces literally wrapped up in the Irish tricolour and spouting an extreme version of Irish nationalism, have burnt down buildings housing asylum seekers – then put on their suits and tried to get elected to the Dail and local councils. Having been largely frustrated on that front – certainly at Dail level, although they got big votes and several councillors elected – they have now reverted to the politics of street violence.
That’s the case in big cities such as Dublin and Cork, but also in some of the border area’s neighbouring towns in the north of Ireland, including Derry and Newry.
Last August, during race-hate riots in Belfast, we saw the grotesque spectacle of far-right racist nationalists from Dublin, waving the Irish tricolour, joining forces with far-right racist loyalists hoisting the Union flag – a grisly embrace across the sectarian divide by two forms of the same reactionary forces.
The far right in the North takes numerous forms, including openly fascist grouplets – and, it would appear in the case of the Ballymena riots, the South East Antrim UDA, the remnants of the previous mass loyalist paramilitary group.
Ballymena was the first town in the North blighted by serious heroin addiction, making for lucrative trade for the UDA and others. It had a powerful industrial base, including big Michelin and Gallaher factories in the past, with strong union organisation. The local trade union movement was instrumental in organising united demonstrations of Protestant and Catholic workers against sectarian intimidation and killings during The Troubles and, more recently, Ballymena Trades Union Council countered far-right forces targeting migrant workers.
In my youth, I had friends who were active in a vibrant Ballymena branch of the Young Socialists – young Protestants and Catholics together championing the cause of workers’ unity and socialism.
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But much of the industrial base in the town has been decimated, with Gallaher’s and Michelin’s factory closures about eight years ago, wiping out nearly 2000 jobs.
This weakened the forces of the organised labour movement and lent itself to an atomisation of the working class, where vicious propagandists of the far-right can latch on to concerns and discontent and channel it towards brutal division and racism.
Those who have incited and organised these attempted pogroms against Romanians and other ethnic minorities, in a town which didn’t have a single asylum seeker funded in 2024, have absolutely no concern for the safety of women and girls. They are purely motivated by a desire to whip up division in the community. Violence against women, including sexual violence and rape, runs rampant across Northern Ireland – and the authorities fail to deal with it.
It suffers the second-highest levels of femicide in Europe. In surveys, an astonishing 98% of women said they had suffered some form of gender-based violence in their lifetime.
In that atmosphere, the cheap, deceitful slogan the far right have deployed in Ballymena and elsewhere, of “keep our children safe”, calling for demonstrations under the guise of “concerned parents”, undoubtedly chimes with the worries of decent working-class people.
But the far-right instigators did nothing to demonstrate against the allegations of historical sexual offences against former Democratic Unionist Party leader Jeffrey Donaldson, nor claims of child sex abuse against Ballymena Traditional Unionist Voice councillor Davy Tweed in the 2010s.
The one difference is the colour of the targets’ skin. The far right have enlisted the services of rioters, including not just ideologically committed racists but also an element of alienated young people, who simply see this as an opportunity to have a go at PSNI officers. The immediate victims of this racist violence were ethnic minority and immigrant families – all of whom were either born in Ballymena or are legally recognised refugees, many of them working in local factories and agribusinesses.
The wider losers are the broader working class, subjected to frenzied divisions and made all the weaker in their own self-defence against dilapidated housing conditions, cuts to services – including health; the North has the longest NHS waiting lists in the UK – and wages that are historically lower than in the rest of Britain for identical jobs.
The most studiously buried history of the past 50-plus years in the North is that of several waves of united demonstrations and strike action by workers from all communities, against sectarian violence and deaths.
At the height of tit-for-tat killings and bombings, workers across Northern Ireland came out on strike, staged rallies, drove back the paramilitaries and were instrumental in forcing sectarian politicians to reach the unstable institutional “power-sharing” arrangements known as the Peace Process.
Ballymena was one of the many towns and cities where those displays of workers’ unity were staged – initiatives led by the cross-community trade union movement, the biggest civic organisation in the North, on most occasions under the pressure of socialist trade unionists who forced the hesitant leadership of the trade union officialdom to take action.
That tradition of workers’ unity in action is urgently required today to counter the attempted racist pogroms and to undercut the false appeal of the far right with a vision of socialist change – to win decent jobs, vastly improved public services, and high-quality housing for all, regardless of their creed, colour or country of birth.
Encouraging beginnings of this counterforce to the rampaging racists have been organised over recent days. Trade unionists, community groups and socialists have staged counter-demos against the far-right in nearby Magherafelt, Derry, Belfast and elsewhere.
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The events of the past few days reinforce the beliefs I’ve held and fought for since my teens in County Fermanagh – for socialism not sectarianism; for action based on class not creed; for working-class unity in pursuit of a peaceful socialist future. The alternatives are all too ugly, as witnessed in last week’s eruption of racist conflagration.
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