Burned Homes, Burning Police Cars: Riots Rock Northern Ireland | WATCH

The city of Ballymena in Northern Ireland experienced a second consecutive night of violent riots, as hundreds of masked rioters attacked police officers, set vehicles ablaze, and caused extensive property damage. The riots began following a protest sparked by an alleged sexual assault in the city, with rioters blaming illegal immigrants.

The riots, which first broke out on Monday after two teenagers were charged in court with serious assault, continued into the early hours of Tuesday. Police reported the use of Molotov cocktails, planks, and stones torn from nearby walls by the rioters. In response, security forces deployed crowd dispersal measures, including water cannons and non-lethal ammunition.

According to eyewitness accounts, one house was completely set ablaze, and a police officer was hospitalized suffering from severe nausea after being exposed to smoke at another site where rioters attempted to set a building on fire. Vehicles were torched, one found flipped over in flames, while police sirens echoed across the city long past midnight.

On Monday night, four homes were damaged by fire, and windows and doors of businesses and additional homes were smashed. The police are investigating the incidents as racially motivated hate attacks. At least 15 officers were injured over the two nights of clashes.

On the sidelines of the Ballymena riots, additional protests caused road blockages in the capital, Belfast, with reports of isolated incidents in other cities, including Newtownabbey and Carrickfergus.

Northern Ireland’s Secretary of State in the UK government, Hilary Benn, strongly condemned the violence, writing on X: “The disturbing scenes of disorder we saw again tonight in Ballymena are unacceptable, they have no place in Northern Ireland.”

Although 27 years have passed since the historic peace agreement that ended decades of bloodshed, certain areas of Northern Ireland remain tense, with riots occasionally erupting.

Since the 17th century, when the British government began settling Protestant English and Scottish populations in the north of the island, tensions with the local Catholic majority sharpened.

The official partition in 1921 between the independent Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, which remained under British rule, did not end the conflicts, it exacerbated them. The subsequent decades, particularly the period known as “The Troubles” from 1969 until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, were marked by severe violence, terrorism, and deep division between Irish nationalists seeking unification with the south and unionists loyal to London. Even today, despite the peace agreement, ethnic and political tensions persist, and sparks of hatred can ignite at any moment, as evidenced by the events of recent days.