Ballymena is my home town. I left it as a small child when my parents took me to London, and I have lived for most of the past 50 years in Dublin. But, for better or worse, it still has a special place in my affections. Like most Irish towns, it has its fair share of lovely, kind people, including some, among them members of my family, who have taken in Ukrainian refugees.

But it is also a place of ugliness, bigotry and hatred, as was shown on Monday of this week when a peaceful protest over an alleged serious sexual assault against a local girl degenerated into a full-scale race riot. Two 14 year old Romanian boys had earlier appeared in court charged with attempted rape. The charges were read to the teenagers by a Romanian interpreter (they denied them).

That was the alarm signal, quickly disseminated by social media . For the next two evenings hundreds of young men – some of them members of the UDA, many masked and hooded – attacked homes in normally peaceful streets where several immigrant families – Romanian, Bulgarian, Filipino and others – lived. They battered down doors, smashed windows and attempted to set fire to houses, some of which had families with children inside. One terrified family of eleven – including three children – barricaded themselves into an attic while attackers broke in and rampaged downstairs. On a recording played on the BBC Stephen Nolan show, listeners heard a man’s voice saying: “There’s someone in that room inside.” A female voice replied: “Aye, but are they local? If they’re local, they need out. If they’re not local, let them stay there.”

David, a 28-year-old Polish man, told Rory Carroll of the Guardian: “The crowd was banging on the door and we were all upstairs. Two Polish and Bulgarian families – about 12 people in all – had clustered together for safety and wedged a sofa against the front door when the mob smashed windows and set fire to the living room, he said. “I smelled the smoke. We came down and ran out the back door to the police station.”

The violence spread to the quiet Protestant village of Cullybackey, three and a half miles outside Ballymena. Kevin Rous, a Filipino man on the night shift in the Wrightbus factory in the town, who lives in the village, got a call at work around midnight. His wife and two small children were awoken from sleep by men burning a car and attacking the front of their house. “I don’t feel safe living in Northern Ireland now,” he said. “We feel extreme fear. I say to all of them [the rioters] – we are not here to destroy your community. We are here legally. We are are far away from the Philippines. I work here as a mechanic. We’re not here to give trouble.”

41 police officers were injured in the riots. PSNI Assistant Chief Constable, Ryan Henderson, called the attacks “racist thuggery pure and simple, and any attempt to justify or explain it as something else is misplaced.” Liam Kelly, chair of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland, which represents officers, said the police had prevented “a pogrom with consequences too painful to contemplate.” As the attacks on businesses, homes and cars spread to other towns, Henderson said the under-staffed PSNI had requested support from other UK police forces, and 80 Scottish officers were due to arrive in the North.

In the event, violence decreased somewhat on Wednesday night, although a leisure centre in Larne, which had provided overnight shelter for two immigrant families fleeing Ballymena, was badly damaged when it was set on fire by masked youths. There were calls for the resignation of the DUP Minister for Communities (and MLA for the Larne area), Gordon Lyons, after he posted on Facebook that “a number of individuals” from Ballymena had been temporarily moved to Larne. PSNI Chief Constable, Jon Boutcher, warned the “bigots and racists” behind three nights of disorder that his officers “will come after you.”

In contrast, the condemnation of the violence by Ballymena’s DUP deputy mayor, Tyler Hoey, was a qualified one. He said foreigners were welcome in the town, but accused the UK government of allowing “busloads” of unvetted people to settle there. “Unfettered immigration needs to be addressed”, he said. Some locals interviewed by the Guardian accused the authorities of turning the town into a “dumping ground” for immigrants and asylum seekers.

A Queen’s University Belfast education lecturer, Dr Rebecca Loader, had a different view. She told the Belfast Telegraph‘s crime reporter, Allison Morris: “Grim scenes in Ballymena, a town that had exactly zero people in receipt of asylum support in 2024. No ‘illegals’ (not that any human should be seen that way); literally everyone was born there or was a legal migrant or refugee.”

Morris compared local immigrant families putting Union flags in their windows in an attempt to escape their houses being attacked, to the Israelites in ancient Egypt putting the blood of a sacrificial lamb on their doors so that God would “pass over” their houses, sparing their firstborn sons, while killing the firstborn sons of the Egyptians. One rioter was heard saying: “You’ve the flag up, so you should be OK.”

Blanka Harneaga, a 38 year old immigrant from the Czech Republic and mother of five, was one of those who put a British flag in her living room window. Did it work? “We’re still here”, she said with a wry smile. I couldn’t help comparing her to my father, who arrived as a political refugee at my mother’s home outside Ballymena from what was then Czechoslovakia in 1948, and was warmly welcomed by her extended family and neighbours.

These ugly happenings make me ashamed of my birthplace. The last time Ballymena hit the headlines, it was also as a result of an upsurge of bigotry and hatred. In December 1996 around 300 loyalists harassed people attending Saturday night mass in a Catholic church in the working class district of Harryville, a short distance from the scene of the latest riots. Catholics were dragged from their cars and roughed up, petrol bombs were thrown at the police and a burning bus blocked the road to Belfast. Local loyalists had picketed the church for the previous 12 weeks in protest at a police ban on an Orange parade through the largely Catholic village of Dunloy, north west of the town. I reported on that relatively minor affray – by the violent standards of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ – for the Irish Times.

Why do loyalists keep displaying this hate-filled face to the world? This latest riot stems from racial hatred, just as one of the first major acts of violence of the ‘Troubles’, the burning of Bombay Street in Catholic West Belfast in August 1969 by loyalist mobs, stemmed from sectarian hatred. Such actions only confirm the image much of the outside world has of Northern Ireland loyalists as ‘beyond the pale’ thugs and bigots. It is fair comment to say that for a community that has few friends in the world anyway, the violent goings on in Ballymena this week will have done absolutely nothing to maintain the few friendships they do have. Their loyalty to the United Kingdom – and particularly to the UK monarchy – is an entirely legitimate political position. Why do they allow it to be sullied by such extremism and violence?