Enda Brady: UK correspondent on the riots breaking out in Ireland's Ballymena

Police have been attacked with fireworks, bottles and bricks as disorder erupted in Northern Ireland for the third night.

The worst of the violence took place in Ballymena, but unrest also spread out to other towns in the surrounding areas.

UK correspondent Enda Brady says the conflict kicked off after a peaceful protest over an alleged sexual assault in Ballymena.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
In the Brady a UK correspondence with us. Hello Inde,
Hey Heather, great to speak to you again. Not looking
good on the GDP front, is it? It's not really
And today was meant to be the big reset off
the back of yesterday's spending review by Rachel Reeves, who's
the chancellor the finance minister here, so horror mantra, and

(00:20):
the narrative was that they were investing and spending and
we're going to see a decade over a newell in
the UK, an awful lot of money being outlined as
rail projects and you know, a new nuclear plant, get
pink things moving again and get money back in people's pockets.
And in the last forty five minutes we've just had
the GDP figures come out for the last month and

(00:41):
the UK economy has shrunk by zero point three percent.
Now what they're saying is behind this, it's clearly Trump's
tariffs that a lot of UK manufacturing front loaded exports
to America to try and get round what he was doing.
But it's having a big impact. And if this keeps
going on, I think this would be the big fear
for Starmer and Reeves here that if this keeps going

(01:03):
on month by month, the economy keeps shrinking zero point
three percent. This is very bad news. Yeah, totally. Hey
listen on Ireland. What's it going to take to get
the stuff to calm down. So we've just had a
third consecutive night of violence in the town of Ballymena
in the North of Ireland. And what's behind this. This
is nothing to do with any of the what you

(01:25):
might call traditional historic issues between the two communities in
the North of Ireland. This is all over an alleged
sexual assault in the town of Ballamina earlier this week.
The victim was a teenaged local girl allegedly attacked by
two fourteen year old Romanians. Now they were arrested, they
were brought to court and the boys spoke only through

(01:48):
a Romanian interpreter. And obviously simmering tensions in the community.
So for three consecutive nights we have seen rioting. We
have seen properties belonging to people who are not born
on the island of Ireland that have been attacked, Vehicles
set alight, dozens of police officers injured, and last night
it took a very sinister twist. So people who have

(02:10):
been burned out with their own properties have now been
moved temporarily to a leisure center in the town of
larn And what happened last night was a gang turned
up and tried to burn down the leisure center. So
the police are so stretched they've had to call in
extra personnel from Police Scotland to come and back up
and backfill. It's very, very worrying. But what's it going

(02:33):
to take to get them to calm down, do you think? Look,
I think the big fear here would be that as
we head into summer. You know, there are traditional parades
from one particular community in the North of Ireland that
happened during July. You know, we've seen summers of discontent
in the North of Ireland previously where there have been
community flash points. All of that had mostly gone away.

(02:56):
Life was good, but this alleged sexual assault has just
been the tinder spark really this week that has kind
of created such kind of chaos And it was interesting
the Assistant Chief Constable of Police Service Northern Ireland coming
out this week and warning people if you riot, you
will be prosecuted and then you could go to prison
and that has not even put people off. Jeez, Inda,

(03:18):
thank you for talking as I really appreciate it. Inda Brady,
are UK corresponding you that business in Ireland? I don't
know if you've been keeping an eye on that, but
that's pretty rough what's going on there. For more from
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