Ballymena Race Riots 🪶 The Good Friday Agreement In Action

Gearóid Ó Loingsigh ☭ writing in Substack on 11-June-2025.

The race riots in Ballymena have shocked some, but are not one bit surprising, not only because we have already had racial disturbances in the north of Ireland with loyalist paramilitaries kicking in people’s doors and moving them out, but because on the one hand Ballymena is a sectarian cesspit and on the other hand the riots fit right in with the logic of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA)

The GFA brought an end to the IRA’s armed campaign, its partial dissolution and disarming (no one believes that a rump muscle squad was not left standing). It also saw Sinn Féin sign up to an agreement which divided the population along sectarian lines. The text does not say Catholic or Protestant, but uses the euphemism of nationalist or unionist. As an agreement that claimed to bring an end to sectarian tensions, it could hardly say it was going to divvy up political power and the public purse along sectarian lines, but that is what it did. As everyone knows, votes in the make-believe parliament of Stormont only count if the representatives are declared to be Catholics or Protestants. There must be an overall majority and a majority within each community i.e. there must be sectarian agreement.

The public purse is shared out on the basis of a sectarian headcount as are public services. The result of course is that public housing is also shared out on a sectarian basis and when the administration slips up and allocates a house to a Catholic in what is considered a Protestant area, then the masked thugs of unionism, the loyalists of the UDA and UVF are on hand to forcibly move people out. Most housing estates are 90% Protestant (in the broad sense) or Catholic. This is not an accident it is policy.

…the position of the DUP and SF whilst in office, since 2007, has not seriously got to grips with any of this; their agreed policy positions as first expressed in the Programme for Cohesion, Sharing and Integration and then in what remains the leading policy document Together: Building a United Community, have been framed within the consociational political logic that accepts the existence of the sectarian divide, and believes that it is best addressed through seeking to maintain the ‘Unionist’ and ‘Nationalist’ communities in a state of equilibrium whilst upholding a spirit of mutual accommodation, co-existence and tolerance. Amongst much else, this has meant that ideas around mixed housing or integrated education have been held back in favour of promoting a limited number of shared neighbourhood projects, shared spaces plans and shared post-primary education sites.[1]

All this happens because the GFA says there are two communities, two cultures and that they shall be respected and maintained as such and all decisions must have the approval of the “leaders” of both communities, lest those communities influence be diluted. Of course, by leaders they not only mean elected politicians but the thugs and boot boys from the UDA and UVF. In May, less than two weeks before the Ballymena riots there were attacks in north Belfast in an attempt to “cleanse” the Clanmill estate of Catholics.[2] It is not past history.

Once you accept the nonsense of sectarian communities and people living in areas according to their religion, it is not much of a push to demand that they also be separated on the basis of other classifications such as nationalities, non-Christian religions and cultures. The unionists in Ballymena know this very well. They have a particularly nasty history of sectarianism. Many will have forgotten the disgusting spectacle of Harryville Catholic Church, where loyalists organised pickets to prevent Catholics going to mass. Harryville was a 98% Protestant neighbourhood, but had a Catholic church in it. The sectarian pickets led by DUP stalwarts saw up to 1000 people and up to 22 Loyalist Marching Bands on occasions turning up to prevent Catholics going to mass, hurling insults and abuse at them. Harryville was Protestant and no Catholics should be there was the logic. The pickets began in September 1996 and went on up till May 1998. The Catholic Church at the centre of the sectarian assault has since closed. It is no accident that this cesspool is also at the centre of racial tensions now.

The god-fearing bible thumping thugs of Ballymena claim to be motivated by sexual assaults allegedly carried out by two migrants. You may think their concern for women’s safety is touching, but you would have to ignore the record of loyalist paramilitaries on women’s rights and also that the head of the DUP, Jeffrey Donaldson, the party most of Ballymena votes for, was accused of sexually abusing, over a long period, two women without so much as a rock from the hellfire and brimstone gang. Emma Little-Pengelly, the Deputy First Minister got her seat at Stormont as Donaldson’s replacement following his decision not to take his seat there but to continue as an MP at the British parliament in London. There is no explanation for it, other than naked racism from the naked sectarians.

If you believe in and accept the logic of the GFA that there are two communities in the North and that they shall be separated forever on that basis, and that no other basis, such as social-class is to be countenanced then you are following the same logic as the Ballymena thugs. Sectarianism and racism go hand in hand, they are not distinct. and a system that shares out position, power and privilege on the basis of religion will eventually get around to doing it on the basis of race. The KKK wasn’t just anti-black it was also a sectarian organisation that detested Catholics and Jews. Loyalists share a similar political perspective and just like the official backing for Jim Crow in the southern United States, sectarianism is official in the North.

Sectarianism is not just a question of ‘religious bigotry, the promotion of one’s religion or religious background at the expense of the alternative’; it is a system. In truth, sectarianism is best interpreted as constituting an intersecting self-perpetuating matrix of social closure around land, housing, education and employment, based on the categorical markers of Protestant and Catholic that result in inequality and social injustice. This is a system centred on an interlinked and mutually reinforcing pattern of exclusion, one that results in cumulative advantage for Protestant people and disadvantage for Catholic people. It is, to be clear, a dehumanising system. And the key point to be made is that Protestant people and Catholic people still confront unequal life chances as a result of how the positional structure of society has been and continues to be overdetermined by the systemic pattern of categorical exclusion.[3]

Protestantism and Catholicism are religious fantasies, they are no basis for anything. Catholic and Protestant workers have a common interest, that of their class. They are working class and have a class enemy. That common interest extends to migrants; they are also workers. Migrants have common class interests with Protestant and Catholic workers and a common enemy. The GFA explicitly discounts this common cause and ruling out unity with migrants is the logical conclusion. Those who condemn the racist riots and intimidation in Ballymena, but support the logic of the GFA must deal with their massive and glaring contradiction: they already support division in society.

Migrants represent a challenge to the sectarianism of the North and the underlying logic of the peace process. If there are only two communities that must be kept apart, then new communities must also be separated. It is at such moments that the reactionary nature of the GFA can be seen. Opposition to racism means opposition to the sectarian set up and the GFA. Let’s not pretend that the racism in Ballymena is something distinct from the sectarianism, it is not. They are flip sides of the same coin and they are fomented by the same system and institutional set up i.e. the Good Friday Agreement and all its inherent sectarian and reactionary elements.

Working class unity means Catholic and Protestant workers side by side with migrant workers. The GFA means each should stick to their ghettoes.

References

[1] Taylor, R. (2024) Systemic sectarianism in Northern Ireland. Race & Class. Vol 66, Issue 4 pp 55-70.

[2] BBC (28/05/2025) NI leaders condemn sectarian attacks on homes.

[3] Taylor, R. (2024) op.cit.

⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.