Once, when I was a teenager, I was in a Spar in Ballymena when a man walked in and announced he would burn the shop to the ground if it didn’t close immediately.
My sister and I did not hesitate. Like everyone else, we believed him – and fled.
We had been intending to dash in to the store for just a few minutes to stock up on essentials, amid fears of a long few days ahead of us as rioting broke out across Northern Ireland in the 1990s over Drumcree.
So it’s terrifying to watch violence unfold in my hometown again, as we have over recent nights.
Around a 30-minute drive from Belfast, although it occasionally felt like further, Ballymena is often dubbed the buckle of the “bible belt” of Northern Ireland, surprising visitors with the number of churches that line its streets.
A DUP heartland, its MP was for many decades the firebrand preacher the Rev Ian Paisley, who used to secure huge parliamentary majorities, often winning one in every two votes cast.
Its status as a prosperous market town in the middle of Northern Ireland, its name literally means ‘middle town’, helped during the long years of the Troubles.
It is the home of Northern Ireland’s first Sainsbury’s, opened not long before the Good Friday Agreement, giving me a weekend bakery job – which occassionally included putting the jam in jam doughnuts – one of hundreds of jobs it brought to the town, as well as a company slogan “A fresh approach” that we hoped matched the times.
That prosperity is one of the reasons that the town attracted immigrants in the years after the peace process proved a lasting success – migrants who are now the subject of horrific violence.
In one video shared online, a woman tells the rioters: “Be careful, lads”, followed by a man telling her there were people living in one of the houses being attacked. She replied: “Aye, but are they local? If they’re local, they need out. If they’re not local, let them f****** stay there.”
Like everywhere in Northern Ireland, Ballymena has suffered its share of atrocities in the past.
The Harryville part of the town, where hundreds of people gathered this week, was the scene of loyalist protests for years against the presence of a Catholic church in a strongly Protestant area in the late 1990s.
In December 1996, a 300-strong contingent of police in riot gear was needed to ensure local people were able to attend Mass, as an article for The Independent recorded at the time.
And, of course, violence erupted over Drumcree, a long-running conflict about a Protestant Orange Order march in Portadown.
After the incident in the Spar, my family stayed home for days, watching events unfold on the news, part of an unofficial night-time curfew that saw thousands of people lock themselves down decades before any of us had ever heard of Covid.
On a separate summer I spent a mini-break in Brussels – won, bizarrely, as part of my school’s quiz team – holed up in a hotel room with three fellow pupils, watching helplessly on CNN as riots erupted at home.
When we landed back in Belfast International airport late at night, the violence had become so widespread we faced a difficult and potentially treacherous journey getting home. At one point we were stopped by police just as our car came face to face with an overturned and burnt out bus.
That was in 1998, when the riots did not stop until the appalling murders of three young brothers in a loyalist arson attack in Ballymoney, about 20 miles from Ballymena.
Hopefully it will not take a tragedy like that for the violence to end this time.
