Last Saturday night a young girl from Ballymena was allegedly raped in Clonavon Terrace in Ballymena. I say “allegedly” as the two young men arrested for the crime haven’t been convicted yet but I think we all know what the outcome will be. A protest highlighting the alleged rape was arranged for Monday night past at which around 2000 people attended. Any and many right minded people supported the protest, myself included, although I didn’t attend as I knew from the outset, owing to the people and personalities who were attending, that it would end in trouble, and it did.
The thing is, I used to live exactly where the rioting was happening around 9 months ago, along Waveney Avenue, right behind the police station. I know the area, I know the people, and I know what it was like to live there. I also know there was constant trouble around that area which the police did little to nothing about. I know our house was broken into by members of the Romani community and they got away with it, even though there is a remote control camera at the back of the police station looking directly down the side of the house we lived in, looking directly down the wall the intruders jumped over…and they still couldn’t convict those who did it because apparently the video was “too grainy”. At the time of the break in, my step-son was in his room, in the house alone and heard the intruders break in the back door.
You see, while not all those of Romani traveller heritage are “dodgy” as one person referred to them, quite a few of them are, and I know that from experience. What I will say is this, in the area the rioting took place, around Clonavon and Waveney Road and Avenue, it was turned into a ghetto for and by Romani travellers. People didn’t feel safe in their homes in the area, there were running battles in the streets at times between Romani men and indeed women, gangs of Romani youths intimidated those who weren’t of their nationality in the wider area, they congregated on street corners in the area, and I even witnessed one guy come to the door with a machete in hand. They broke into our garage at the back of our house numerous times and left our possessions lying in the street. How do I know it was them? Their kids were playing with the toys they had taken from the garage and they were sitting outside their houses on our chairs that they had taken from the same garage. Romanian friends of mine call the Romani travelling community “scum”…”they’re not my people”…”we hate them”.
Personally, I’m not that way inclined!
I still don’t think the rioting was a warranted response to this. I say this because no one ever engaged with the Romani community properly. They were seen as a problem but no one wanted to sort the ‘problem’ out through talking to them, only by castigating them and vilifying them and allowing the issue to simmer away in the background causing a toxic atmosphere.
While the protest was warranted and justified in what is known as ‘Ken’s Carpark’, the rioting was sheer racism and I will not back down from that position. The aim of that rioting was to hurt and possibly kill (as we heard on the Nolan Show) those of Romani descent. It was sheer mindless, barbarism by a mass of thugs aimed at people whose skin wasn’t the same colour as theirs. In the midst of it all, the few elderly residents left in the area, on the same streets had to stand outside their homes in an attempt to stop them being burned by the baying mob. Filipino families were burned out of their homes simply because they were immigrants…and these people dare to say this was about the safety of women and girls? That it wasn’t racism? One of those burned out of their home in Cullybackey is a Filipino nurse, she now has no car to get to work as they burned that too. I see the Filipinos riding to work to the Wrights factory every morning at 04:00 and after. They work hard and ‘integrate into our society’ which apparently the Romani community didn’t…or is it that we didn’t let them integrate into our society?
It is so bad now that people in Ballymena, of Loyalist/British persuasion have been told by certain shady figures to put up Union flags on their windows to identify themselves as locals, which they have done. Those who don’t have Union flags up in certain areas have had their windows smashed and their doors kicked in. It’s almost like a reverse of the Jewish having the star of David painted on their walls.
It genuinely saddens me that this is where we’ve come to. Where an entire community has been pushed out of an area because of a crime two young lads allegedly carried out. In 2023/24 over 4094 sexual assaults happened in NEI, of those, 1181 were rape, and not a single riot took place, not one! So were these riots really about protecting our women and girls? Or were they sheer, overt racism and the hatred of one minority community because no one tried to reach out to them in an attempt to integrate them into our society, to make them feel welcome?
One thing is for sure, immigration needs to be looked at, because these people were here legally. Some had jobs, some didn’t. Landlords need to be looked into also due to the fact some were lifting in excess of £800 per week from some properties. Landlords, which local residents had approached with their concerns, concerns which were brushed off and dismissed.
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That’s a very fair and nuanced piece on the subject. The people hunting down immigrants are more than likely the descendants of the people who protested against Catholics moving in. Some people are just racist. Others have valid reasons to complain about thieves and trouble makers. I do know one thing, Christ would not take part in a “protest march”. Some unionist politicians are squirming on the hook. Sammy Wilson agreed with his constituent saying there were too many ethnics. That old hypocrite Enoch Powell had to move to the backwaters of Unionism to get elected again. The UDA and UVF have always had links with English bigots.