Ballymena. A small town in Northern Ireland, known for its brick buildings, its Loyalists, and its history. And now also for burning houses, shattered windows, racist manhunts, and a police force firing rubber bullets at its own youth. Seventeen officers injured in just one night, five arrests, firebombs, Molotov cocktails, and a blaze that reaches far beyond the town's borders – into a Europe that is increasingly forgetting what it once aspired to be.
What is happening in Ballymena these days is not a local outburst. It is a symptom of a fever that has long spread across the continent. A disease fed by populist rhetoric, digital disinformation, and the systematic dismantling of democratic decency. Two fourteen-year-old boys, charged with an alleged rape, are enough in this climate to set entire streets on fire – not because of the crime, but because of their language: Romanian. Not the rule of law, but origin determines guilt in the mob of outrage. The police speak of "racist thuggery," but it is more than that. It is a collective unhinging, born from right-wing echo chambers, political cowards, and an ideological current that stretches from the British Isles to Budapest.
Because Ballymena is not an isolated case. It is a fragment of the same violence that rages against migrant marches in southern France, that sets fire to asylum shelters in Saxony, and that in Trump's America sends out ICE units to detain even UNICEF ambassadors at airports. The faces may change, but the strategy remains the same: fear as a tool, exclusion as a program. The anger of the streets is mobilized, given a scapegoat – and met with silence when it turns into flames. And these flames are starting to blaze. In Northern Ireland, where Clonavon Terrace becomes a combat zone, people post signs in their windows saying "British" – hoping not to be targeted. In Belfast, the walls separating Protestants and Catholics still stand – and now new walls are rising, invisible but just as deadly: between migrants and locals, between law and justification, between empathy and rage.
The political class delivers what it promises – though in a bleak inversion. Jim Allister of the Traditional Unionist Voice declares that "uncontrolled migration" is to blame – a sentence that sounds like a slogan but acts like a command. The poison drips slowly but steadily – first into the comment sections, then onto the streets, finally into minds. Today, anyone in Ballymena speaking with a Romanian accent is not just insulted. They fear for their lives.
And Europe? Europe remains silent. Once again. In London, the regional government calls for restraint, yet the police are already preparing to bring in reinforcements from England and Wales. It is a dance on the edge of a knife – in a country that only three decades ago was bleeding from civil war, and now risks collapsing again. This time not along sectarian lines – but along nationalist, racist, anti-humanist fault lines. And the pattern repeats itself: whether in Northern Ireland, southern France, Saxony, or Arizona – it is always the same mechanisms, the same narratives, the same tacit encouragement from above. President Trump calls protesters "animals" and "foreign enemies," and in Ballymena, that phrase echoes – translated into cobblestones.
This spiral must be broken. Not with more fences, not with tougher police action, but with a politics that no longer shirks its moral responsibility. The violence in Ballymena is not an exception – it is a harbinger. The fire zones are volatile. What hits houses today can destroy democracies tomorrow. Those who do not rise now will soon live in a Europe where the word "civil society" is only a shadow of what it once meant. We must not get used to people writing their nationality on signs to stay safe. We must not allow lies to be translated into violence. And we must not accept that our children learn to start fires before they have learned to listen.
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