A family in Ballymena hid in their attic with three children and listened to people rampage through the rooms below. A Filipino man watched his car flipped upside down on the street and burned out. Residents began posting signs in their windows - Union Jacks, English flags, the flag of Ulster, hand-written notes declaring themselves British or Filipino households - trying to mark themselves as not-the-target. Two weeks of violence began in Ballymena on 9 June 2025 and rolled across Northern Ireland. The framing of those nights matters. The rioters described what they were doing in many ways. Police described it as racist thuggery. A local estimate counted two thirds of Ballymena's twelve hundred Roma residents gone by the end. The Guardian summarised it as: "The rioters... won."
On 7 June 2025, a teenage girl was allegedly sexually assaulted on Clonavon Terrace in Ballymena. The Police Service of Northern Ireland charged two fourteen-year-old boys with attempted rape. On 9 June, the two boys appeared at Coleraine Magistrates' Court via videolink, spoke through a Romanian interpreter, denied the charges, and were remanded in custody. The case was a serious one and the alleged victim deserved a serious response. The response that came was not the legal process - which continued and, by November 2025, saw prosecutors drop the charges after new evidence meant the case no longer met the threshold for prosecution. The response that came on the streets was something else. A peaceful vigil at Clonavon Terrace on the evening of 9 June was overtaken by a group of masked people who attacked properties and built barricades. The vigil was the excuse. What followed was a pogrom in everything but name - and the chairman of the PSNI used the word to describe what his officers had been trying to prevent.
An estimated 2,500 people gathered on the first night. Rioters threw bricks, fireworks, and petrol bombs at police. Two police cars were damaged. Fifteen officers were injured. Four homes were set on fire, three families evacuated, six properties on Clonavon Terrace had doors and windows smashed. In nearby Cullybackey, a petrol bomb was thrown at a vehicle and spread fire to a property with a woman and two children inside. Police investigated the attack as a racially motivated hate crime. One rioter failed to throw a petrol bomb and was himself engulfed in flames. The PSNI arrested a 29-year-old man on suspicion of riotous behaviour. After watching a Filipino neighbour's car flipped and burned, residents along the affected streets began hanging flags and writing signs to identify themselves to the next wave - British, Filipino, anything that might tell a stranger with a brick where to throw. That kind of self-identification has a long, ugly history in Europe.
Disorder spread. On the second night, seventeen more officers were injured and disorder appeared in Belfast, Carrickfergus, and Newtownabbey. On 11 June, a leisure centre in Larne that had been providing emergency shelter for families displaced from Ballymena was attacked by around a hundred people and set on fire. The displaced families had been moved before the attack, but others were still inside attending swimming and yoga classes. The yoga class fled through the back door when a brick came through the window. East Antrim MLA Danny Donnelly called it a sustained attack. In Coleraine, petrol bombs were thrown at police, a bus was attacked, a tyre shop was broken into and its tyres added to a fire. On 12 June, Portadown was the worst hit, with 22 officers injured. A housing association had to advise residents to leave their homes ahead of a planned protest. On 16 and 17 June, the violence shifted to the Nailors Row area of Derry, which the chief constable described as "blatant sectarian violence" - a related but distinct disorder, not racially motivated according to police. Police Scotland sent officers under mutual aid. By the end of the two weeks, 107 police officers had been injured, 56 people had been arrested, 27 remanded in custody, and police had fired 32 attenuating energy projectiles across five nights.
The PSNI denied loyalist paramilitary involvement in the riots. Daniel Holder, director of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, a human rights advocacy group, said the disorder followed a pattern of far-right anti-immigrant violence in Northern Ireland since 2023, taking place in areas with significant loyalist activity, featuring what he called a degree of paramilitary control, and timed to the (mostly unionist) marching season. Holder dismissed accounts of nationalist involvement in the Ballymena disorder. The PSNI itself was operating in what the BBC called a time of crisis. The force had around 6,200 officers, with 1,500 of those either on sickness absence or restricted duties. When the service started, it had 9,000. Official reports had suggested it needed at least 7,500. The chief constable, Jon Boutcher, had been warning for months that the service was critically underfunded. Mutual aid - the practice of borrowing officers from other UK forces - had to be requested, as it had been the previous year during the post-Southport disorder.
About 1,200 Roma people lived in Ballymena before 9 June. A local estimate after the violence said about two thirds of them had left. In November 2025, prosecutors confirmed that the charges against the two fourteen-year-old boys had been dropped after new evidence meant the case no longer met the threshold for prosecution. The legal process continued and reached the conclusion the criminal courts reached. The streets had reached their own conclusion in June. Families who had built lives in Ballymena - some for years, some recently - were gone. Homes had been burned. Doors and windows replaced. Cars rebuilt or written off. The displaced families went where displaced families go: somewhere else, somewhere quieter, somewhere they hoped a brick would not come through the window. An anti-racism rally at Belfast City Hall on 14 June drew its own crowd, in support of migrants. The aftermath the Guardian summarised was bleak. The rioters, the paper wrote, got what they wanted. The work of rebuilding what they broke - and the work of being honest about why - belongs to a wider Northern Ireland that has not finished it yet.
The riots began at 54.86°N, 6.28°W in Ballymena, County Antrim, and spread to multiple towns across Northern Ireland over two weeks in June 2025. The most affected sites were Ballymena, Larne (54.85°N, 5.80°W), Portadown (54.42°N, 6.45°W), Coleraine, and the Nailors Row area of Derry. Nearest airport to Ballymena is Belfast International (EGAA), about 18 nautical miles south; the disorder areas all sit within Belfast International's traffic catchment.