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In 1972, loyalist paramilitaries fired bullets into the home of a Catholic woman, Sarah McClenaghan. That night she was at home with her lodger, a Protestant, and her disabled teenage son, David. After forcing her son to get his mother’s rosary beads, proving that she was Catholic, a loyalist paramilitary raped Sarah. David was tortured. The gang then shot them both, David dying of his wounds.
I thought about David and Sarah as I watched rolling news of the pogroms in Ballymena. I thought about them in light of the lie that violence against women and girls has been imported to Northern Ireland via migrants or asylum seekers. It’s always been here.
The rioters say they are acting to drive out foreigners who pose a threat to women and girls. The irony isn’t lost on anybody with knowledge of the local area. Modern-day loyalist paramilitaries are reportedly involved with the violence. In the Belfast Telegraph this week, journalist Allison Morris reported that members of the South East Antrim Ulster Defence Association are among the rioters. “The organisation,” she writes, “has been regularly named by our sister paper, the Sunday Life, as protecting sex offenders.” Morris regularly faces death threats for her brave reporting.
The riots in Ballymena are about racism and nothing more. Hatred smothers every brick and petrol bomb thrown. Nobody causing trouble cares about women or children. There are no legitimate concerns at the heart of this. Local Facebook groups with links to the far right are asking for addresses to hit – Roma people are the main target of their ire. Flyers posted around towns and cities call for people to take a stand to protect “our women” and “our Christian values”.
The trigger for the violence in Ballymena was the trauma and pain of a local family. Earlier in the week, two 14-year-old boys were arrested and charged with the attempted rape of a young girl. Romanian interpreters were required at court.
After the arrests, the alleged victim’s family asked for support and solidarity from their local community. Hundreds did so, peacefully protesting to show the family that they weren’t alone. Then came the violence. The chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said the victim of the alleged assault has been “further traumatised” by the rioting. Her family have publicly called for the violence to stop.
Women have never been safe in Northern Ireland. Generations bore the weight of the Troubles, running households and raising children with absent husbands. Hundreds were murdered in the conflict. During the peace talks that led to the Good Friday agreement, the Women’s Coalition, a political party, described the 30-year conflict as an “armed patriarchy”.
Northern Ireland isn’t a place where women and girls are cherished. The PSNI recorded 4,090 sexual offences in Northern Ireland in 2023-24. Twenty-five women have been killed in five years, mostly by white men from Northern Ireland.
I knew one of them: Natalie McNally. We used to be mates. She last contacted me to ask about the home-buying process (I used to be a conveyancing solicitor). Natalie was buying her first house and the process was dragging on. She was killed in that same house in December 2022, her 15-week-old son in her belly. I was holding my own four-week-old son when I learned that she was dead. The trial is due to take place in November, with the accused previously indicating that he is pleading not guilty.
Well, some say, if we have lots of homegrown criminals, we don’t need more. This is, again, another racist argument, an age-old trope that non-white men are sexual deviants. The problem is men, full stop. In every country in the world, in every community and every faith, people hate women. Misogyny doesn’t respect borders. Fascists want to talk about foreign men to distract from their own disgusting behaviour.
Immigration concerns have featured heavily in the news. Because of the Troubles, Northern Ireland always had low levels of migration. That has changed in recent years. Net migration reached its highest levels in 15 years in 2024. No doubt this has changed certain areas and proved alienating for local people and migrants alike. However, according to a Northern Ireland assembly report, Northern Ireland is still the least diverse region of the UK. Only 3.4% of people are from a minority ethnic group, compared to 18.3% in England.
Before migrant numbers rose, Northern Ireland’s public services were on their knees. The health service has all but collapsed. The housing system is under considerable strain, we don’t have enough housing to meet demand and rents have risen to unaffordable levels.
People have migrated into this mess. It would be churlish to deny that higher numbers have put pressure on the system. But it’s a flat-out lie to blame migrants and refugees for this country’s ills. Migrants didn’t decimate the NHS. Refugees didn’t underfund social housing and homeless services. Local and national politicians did that. They are doing very little to fix the systems that broke under their watch. It’s easier to blame people working as Deliveroo drivers.
Northern Ireland needs to tackle its fondness for racism and xenophobia. Racially motivated hate crime is at its highest level since records began. It affects every community, Catholic and Protestant. You can’t “legitimate concern” your way through a pogrom and doing so only validates hatred.
If women in Northern Ireland rioted every time one of us was attacked, the country would lie in ashes.
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Sarah Creighton is a lawyer, writer and political commentator from Northern Ireland
