It seems to be the exact reverse of what’s happening – and trying to happen – here in the States, though.
In Northern Ireland, it’s the native Irish who are gathering in the streets and going on a destructive bender, now in town after town, after two 14-year-old ‘immigrant’ teenagers were charged with raping a young girl on Monday in a town called Ballymena.
That seems to have been the last straw.
Fifteen police officers were injured and four houses set alight in anti-migrant riots after two teenagers, thought to be Romanian, were charged with the sexual assault of a girl in Northern Ireland.
Two 14-year-old boys appeared at a local court by video link on Monday, charged with attempted rape. The charges were read to them by a Romanian interpreter.
Violence erupted in Ballymena, County Antrim, on Monday night after a peaceful vigil by hundreds of people had been held in the town centre.
Jim Allister, the North Antrim MP, said Ballymena had been “overburdened” by “unchecked migration”, which was a source of “past and future tensions”.
The tensions in the town aren’t caused by the classic influx of North Africans and Islamic asylum seekers in so much of the United Kingdom. The newcomers are rumored to be predominantly members of the Roma tribe, mainly from Romania and Bulgaria, who have been flooding into the tiny town of 33,000, but which is still the seventh-largest city in the country.
…Mr Allister said the violence had been led by people from outside Ballymena. Similar claims were made about the riots triggered by the murders in Southport.
The leader of the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice party claimed that migrants, especially from the Roma community, arrived in Northern Ireland from the Republic “by the busload”.
…“Whereas we’re supposed to have left the EU, the Roma community, being based mostly in Romania and Bulgaria, are members of the EU, and therefore they have free passage into the Republic of Ireland.
“And from the Republic of Ireland, they come by the busload at times into Northern Ireland without any restraint at our border. So it is a part of a wider immigration issue which has the potential to spill over into dissent.”
There came a second night of protests that started with fireworks being aimed at police and the action spread to more cities.
…The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said officers in the Clonavon Terrace area of the Co Antrim town came under “sustained attack over a number of hours with multiple petrol bombs, heavy masonry, bricks and fireworks in their direction”.
A spokesman said a number of protests took place in areas of Belfast, Lisburn, Coleraine and Newtownabbey earlier in the evening.
In Carrickfergus, two bins were set alight and bottles and masonry thrown at police in the Sunnylands area by a group of 20 to 30 young people at around 8.30pm.
In Newtownabbey bins were set alight at the roundabout on O’Neill Road.
Anti-#immigrant #riots have been going on for the second day in a row in #Ballymena, #Northern #Ireland, after a teenage #girl was #raped.
Two #Romanians raped a girl. People came out to protest.
The state-run #BBC immediately called the protests “#racist thuggery.” pic.twitter.com/WzOEewwD6G
— Moriarty (@777Moriarty777) June 11, 2025
By the third night, residents had started marking their doors with their national flags, and police had resorted to water cannons and dogs to try to keep the ever-widening and violent protests under control.
…To steer rioters away from their homes, residents have started marking their doors with Union Jack signs and flags, or signs saying “British household.” Another home’s signage read “Filipino lives here,” hoping that their particular identity isn’t the target of violence. “No one, now or ever, should feel the need to place a sticker on their door to identify their ethnicity just to avoid being targeted,” lamented Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O’Neill in a Wednesday statement.
While Ballymena is the current epicenter of the mayhem — alongside more peaceful and orderly marches — the outward, active discontent has spread to other cities and towns, including Belfast, Lisburn, Coleraine and Newtownabbey. Per the latest census, 16% of Ballymena residents are now something other than native British or Irish, with the largest group being Romanians, followed by Poles, Bulgarians and Slovakians.
They were still out throwing Molotov cocktails last night, although Ballymena itself had simmered down some.
Rioters attack police on fourth night of Northern Ireland unrest
Rioters attacked police with missiles on the fourth night of unrest in Northern Ireland.
Masked youths in Portadown, County Armagh, launched masonry at riot police as a week of disorder continued.
The unrest came despite Northern Ireland’s police chief vowing to arrest and prosecute the “bigots and racists” behind the violence.
A total of 41 police officers have been injured in the riots and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has made 15 arrests so far.
…He said foreign families had been forced to hide in attics and wardrobes in their homes in Ballymena as rioters went on the rampage on Monday.
Thursday’s disorder appeared less intense than earlier in the week.
The finger-pointing was beginning, too, from locals who said they’d complained for years about the conditions the immigrants lived in while collecting benefits, with no response from local ministers. To the natural tension that builds in a tight-knit, small community when a large influx of people from a different culture arrives and refuses to assimilate.
When that’s coupled with Northern Ireland’s all too recent past?
…The list of complaints is a familiar one: they claim few of the new arrivals speak English and require the support of translators in order to be able to access local services. There are concerns that the Roma people are more likely to be on benefits compared to other ethnic groups. Local women have complained about harassment from groups of Roma men (and women) as they walk to and from their homes. And to complicate matters, no one seems quite sure whether the new arrivals have crossed the border from the Republic of Ireland or are in the UK legally, having arrived in the UK before EU Freedom of Movement was scrapped on December 31, 2020.
…Do local communities have any right to object to the imposition of alien, or at least unfamiliar, cultures upon them? Is it always irrational and xenophobic to resent someone because of their apparent refusal to learn the language of the country in which they have chosen to live? Is it similarly unreasonable to object to the amount of local authority resources devoted towards easing that problem?
And while it is both dangerous and unjust to make blanket assumptions about any nationality’s attitudes to women and sex, it is undeniable that certain cultures have, by western standards, an outdated view of women’s roles in society. Until relatively recently, it was decreed by our political masters that we should never cast aspersions on such attitudes and cultures, but such restrictions are no longer taken seriously, not after the grooming gangs scandal, or Kemi Badenoch’s warning that not all cultures are equally valid.
An entire community cannot and should not be held accountable for the alleged sexual assault on a teenage girl. But to dismiss local anger as racism, to order people to accept whatever changes are imposed on their communities by their political betters without demur, is simply storing up greater trouble for the future.
They still have walls from ‘The Troubles’ separating some communities in the country. They’re not really very well practiced at getting along with each other, let alone dumping foreign cultures into the stew.
… The protests, reminiscent of race-related rioting in Belfast and England last summer, reflect the “hidden issues of Northern Ireland being historically not very exposed to newcomers and a society divided along the lines of sectarian identity and belonging”, said Ulrike Vieten, a senior lecturer on the sociology of migration and racism at Queen’s University in Belfast.
“It’s a dangerous cocktail.”
But there is one shared lesson in both situations, however dissimilar the parties on the streets in either Northern Ireland or Los Angeles, flinging the combustibles are: assimilation is key.
And that hasn’t happened.
