Qualla: 2025 Northern Ireland riots

2025 Northern Ireland riots: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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."

2025 Northern Ireland riots: What Triggered It

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 t...

2025 Northern Ireland riots: The First Night in Ballymena

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

2025 Northern Ireland riots: Larne, Portadown, Coleraine, Derry

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 arou...

2025 Northern Ireland riots: What Daniel Holder Said, and What the Police Did Not Say

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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, taki...

2025 Northern Ireland riots: What the Two Weeks Cost

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...