tell the truth about Ballymena

perfidious albion is missing the point again

There’s a way things unfold in Ballymena that’s hard to explain unless you’ve lived in Northern Ireland. Paramilitary threat, masked men at the door, vigilante patrols, police “monitoring” the situation. As the news broke this weekend, the English commentariat - newly attuned to the frequent riots across the water, having recently had a spate of their own - rushed to file it under immigration tensions or border fears, as if the rotting teeth of loyalism and decades of silence have nothing to do with it. As if this is about foreignness, a mirror of Englands race politics, and not the oldest kind of violence we’ve got.

Let’s be clear: what’s happening in Ballymena isn’t a surprise. It’s a pattern. It’s a slow-motion replay of pogrom logic dressed up in the language of “community safety.” Catholic families forced out. Roma families harassed. Polish workers targeted. Same script. Different decade. It repeats every year, as ‘silly season’ approaches - the pejorative term often used to describe the period in the lead up to 12th July, when loyalist paramilitaries are at their bravest and boldest.

There’s a fantasy, mostly exported, that the peace process turned paramilitaries into community workers and football coaches. And yes, some did put on high-vis vests and organise charity raffles. But plenty just swapped guns for drugs and stayed on top by keeping fear in circulation. Loyalist gangs in Ballymena didn’t vanish. They mutated; into property owners, enforcers, gatekeepers of who gets to live peacefully in which housing estates.

Ballymena isn’t a town gripped by sudden fear of migration. It’s a town that’s long protected its own silence. For years, stories of sexual exploitation, particularly of young girls, circulated quietly. Everyone knew, but nobody with power dared speak it aloud. The names involved were men with connections. Ex-paramilitaries turned “businessmen.” The kind of people who walk into a council meeting and never get asked to sign in.

Ballymena has a dark shadow: covert sexual exploitation networks tied to loyalist paramilitaries turned drug dealers. In November 2015, six people, including five men, were arrested in child sexual exploitation investigations around Ballymena. It wasn’t the first such case locally, nor was it the last.

Beyond the small minority of cases successfully prosecuted, numerous accounts and survivor testimonies point to former UVF/UDA figures, once "community leaders", who trafficked vulnerable young women, often shielding themselves with impunity. These weren’t isolated incidents disguised as tragedy; instead they formed a pattern of control.

These men sat on council boards. They were known. People could name them then - in fact we could name them now, if we were content to see our families windows put in, and houses burned out.

Remember the Good Friday Agreement? It brought peace, yes, but it also embedded paramilitary-linked organisations into the fabric of publicly funded community infrastructure. Loyalist groups like the UVF and UDA began receiving government funding under the guise of community development. EU and UK peace funds flowed into front organisations run by ex-paramilitaries. They rebranded as "community workers" while continuing to enforce control, as a kind of twisted, state-subsidised security firm.

The state’s failure to challenge paramilitary control in towns like Ballymena didn’t happen by accident. It was convenient. It kept a lid on things. It gave the illusion of peace without redistribution, without truth-telling. And now, when the lid lifts and the old tactics return, threats scrawled on walls, social cleansing in the name of order, the rest of the UK acts like this is new, like it’s reflective of British politics more broadly. Like this isn’t deeply, painfully familiar to those of us who grew up with it.

English media understands part of the story. Over the weekend, before riots began, two 14 year old Roma boys were arrested on suspicion of the attempted sexual assault of a young girl in the town. For them; this is the origin of the violence - they point to claims that the town has been flooded with refugees, that Mears has bought up housing for asylum seekers pushing locals out, that the town is run by gangs.

This is not true. The houses being targeted are not occupied by asylum seekers, they are private rentals. There is not a shortage of housing in Ballymena. There is a shortage of social housing, upon which many locals rely, but that social housing stock is not available to asylum seekers. There are about 2,500 asylum seekers in the entirety of Northern Ireland, most of then in Belfast, an hour away from the town of Ballymena.

The town is run by gangs, I suppose, in the sense that the loyalist elements that control it have long left politics behind, in favour of drug running - as early as 1998, loyalists running kilos of heroin into deprived estates in Ballymena was described as a key driver of its poor social cohesion by government. Anyone familiar with the town in recent years could tell you that it has only since gotten worse, with a (white British driven) unemployment rate of 11% following.

Much of the violence last night was coordinated via a Facebook page called Ballymena Reaction Group. Search for it, scroll through its posts - you’ll find post after post containing the addresses, street names and house numbers, of foreign nationals living in Ballymena. Not criminals, not rapists. Just neighbours with different colour passports.

Littered in between those posts you’ll find an equally familiar Northern Irish rhythm - pictures of smashed up cars, smashed in windows, with captions like “Don’t poke the bear Alex, your a wannabee gangster that can easily be found. This isn’t a threat, just advise from some old adversaries. You still have family in Devenagh Way, Ballymoney Rd and Summerfield Street, think of them #takingballymenaback”.

Videos abound of masked thugs, setting fire to the curtains of houses on local roads after smashing in residents windows. In one such clip, a man is heard warning that there is someone in the room that another man is currently struggling to set alight. Beside him a woman remarks “Aye but are they local? If they’re local they need out. If they’re not local, let them fucking stay there”.

You’d think, reading English coverage, that Ballymena was just the latest in a series of towns reacting to demographic shifts. But that misreads the whole terrain. Any analysis of this that doesn’t report on the history, the climate of fear and total control that paramilitaries exert in Ballymena, the extent to which paramilitary elements - dozens of them with their faces visible and identifiable in tiktok livestreams each night - have driven and directed this violence is so incomplete as to be functionally useless.

This isn’t about demographics. It’s about control; about who gets to feel safe, and who gets to be made unsafe to keep the hierarchy in place. The idea that Ballymena’s problems start with immigration is like saying the house is on fire because someone lit a candle. It ignores the pile of kindling that’s been gathering for decades, with local paramilitary control piled as high as a bonfire on the Craigyhill estate.

There’s an old joke about Northern Ireland - that third party identity is basically moot; ‘aye, but are you a Catholic Muslim or a Protestant Muslim’. But joke or not there’s some truth to it, and the problem loyalists have with the other has always been the same. They don’t conform to the identity based schisms in local politics, which often means they refuse, instinctively, to automatically respect and fear paramilitaries in the way that locals who have borne witness to their violence for decades do.

This causes an enforcement problem, one we’ve seen play out across the province repeatedly since the peace process was signed - immigrants, be they Eastern European, Roma, Middle Eastern, Asian, Black - subject to property damage, violence, warnings; a reminder that they must pick a side, and pick the right one.

I’m not talking about this in the abstract; I grew up with this in West Belfast. At the time it was a new, snazzy loyalist offshoot, a poor mans copycat of the English mainlands skinhead ‘Combat 18’. I remember families being forced to leave overnight, threats daubed on walls, midnight knocks. Bricks through windows, fires on the site, my uncle and his friends sat outside with a hunting rifle in hand all night, silently, partly to keep watch, partly to be watched - a symbol that his family weren’t fair game or easy pickings for men who had only known violence their entire lives, and whose identities are premised on control.

Read the English coverage and you'd think Ballymena was experiencing some spontaneous cultural backlash. It isn't. It's the logical outcome of a decades-long refusal to reckon with loyalist power, sexual exploitation, and sectarian control.

Just two years ago a young girl was brutally assaulted and killed in Ballymena. Up to a dozen men were involved. Men from loyalist families, whose stature has protected them, who witnesses have refused to speak out about despite her families desperate pleas for help, because of the culture of fear imbued. Some of those men have been interviewed by English TV channels about their ‘concerns’ for women’s safety in Ballymena. Men who stood front row at the funeral of one of the towns most notorious and convicted pedophiles - a loyalist councillor - were quoted yesterday in an English newspaper.

If you're going to report from places like Ballymena, if you're going to send cameras and columnists into estates carved up by paramilitary control, then tell the truth. Don’t sanitise it as some vague cultural unrest or a ‘migration issue.’ Don’t pretend you can understand what’s happening here without naming the loyalist gangs still running housing estates, still controlling communities, still profiting off silence. Journalism that fails to say that isn’t neutral. It’s complicit.