Another community in flames. Masonry and Molotov cocktails thrown at police. A leisure centre, believed to be housing migrants, set ablaze by a bigoted mob. Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before.

This week, Ballymena in County Antrim, Northern Ireland became the latest town within these troubled isles to be ripped apart by fear, loathing and rioting – sparked by an alleged crime committed by migrants.

On Monday, two 14-year-old Romanian Roma boys were charged with attempted oral rape of a teenage girl. The BBC could only bring itself to mention the boys’ background obliquely, noting they ‘confirmed their names and ages through a Romanian interpreter’.

This horrific crime appears to have snapped something, in another working-class community experiencing a heady mix of deindustrialisation, strained resources, crime, mass immigration and fraying social bonds.