The Ballymena violence has nothing to do with ‘protecting women’. It is racism, pure and simple | Sarah Creighton

In 1972 , loyalist paramilitaries fired bullets into the home of a Catholic woman, Sarah McClenaghan .

She was at home with her lodger, a Protestant , and her disabled teenage son, David .

The gang then shot them both, David dying of his wounds.

I thought about them in light of the lie that violence against women has been imported to Northern Ireland via migrants or asylum seekers.

It would be churlish to deny that higher numbers have put pressure on the system.

But it's a flat-out lie to blame migrants and refugees for this country’s ills.

Migrants didn’t decimate the NHS or underfund social housing and homeless services.

Politicians are doing very little to fix the systems that broke under their watch.