Stay or go? Anti-migrant mobs leave families with a dilemma

When the mob comes hunting, the foreigners who remain on Clonavon Road in Ballymena entrust their fate to stickers on front doors and flags on windows that signal they are the good foreigners who cause no trouble and deserve to be spared.

- Rory Carroll

When the mob comes hunting, the foreigners who remain on Clonavon Road in Ballymena entrust their fate to stickers on front doors and flags on windows that signal they are the good foreigners who cause no trouble and deserve to be spared. "Filipino lives here," declare posters with the Filipino flag, pasted as talismans against destruction. Other families have hung up union flags and loyalist bunting in hope of deflecting the crowd's wrath and avoiding selection. "We put it up yesterday," Blanka Harnagea, 38, from the Czech Republic, said yesterday, indicating the British flag on her living room window. Was it working? A wry smile. "We're still here."

On a street of scorched, abandoned homes it was a fragile victory because no one knew if the rioting that has scarred the Antrim town of Ballymena this week would abate or continue and spread to other towns in Northern Ireland.

Hundreds of people, many masked, targeted foreign-owned homes and businesses on Monday and Tuesday in a spree of smashing, burning and missile-throwing that turned into assaults on police that left 32 officers injured and several properties and vehicles torched.

In the Commons Keir Starmer joined Northern Ireland politicians in pleading for calm. But foreign residents in Ballymena grappled with the decision: flee, or hunker down and hope for the best? "The crowd was banging on the door and we were all upstairs," said David, a 28-year-old Polish man who withheld his surname.