Joe Pike
speaker
1,291 appearances
16 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 6 Sep
Joe Pike’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 16 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 5.
Appearances
Two 14-year-old boys appeared in court.
charged over that attack.
They spoke in court through a Romanian interpreter and those charges a few months later on were withdrawn.
So a protest was held in support of the Gardiner family but then crowds came onto the streets and rioting broke out over several nights, firstly in Balamina and then as I say in other
towns such as Lorne and Portadown and over that week more than 60 police officers were injured so it was really a dreadful week particularly for the police on the front line of that and something that police are
very conscious of going into every summer in Northern Ireland.
I mean, going back years and years and years, you, of course, have had riots of a completely different nature, if you like, sparked by totally different issues around controversies, for example, over parading.
So it's something the police in Northern Ireland are always geared up for every summer.
And they're particularly conscious, really, that this incident in North Belfast, that they're
have been calls for people to go onto the streets and protest.
And the police are conscious of that and are trying to manage the situation and working with politicians, indeed, to try to appeal for calm.
Yes, that's right.
I think what police are certainly very much trying to avoid here is any perception that they are indifferent to this, that they're not doing enough.
They are very much making the point again and again, as you say, that they are taking this as seriously as they can, that they understand this.
community feelings, that they understand the strength of those communities' feelings, but they're appealing for that not to translate into a big problem on the streets.
Particularly, as I've said, when you look back at what was happening around this time last year, everybody knows
the dangers of that around incidents like this.
And part of the police strategy, it seems to me, is to try to make the point that they care about what communities think and feel and say even about these sorts of incidents, and the trying within that to try to stop people from taking it any further.
Chris in Belfast, thank you very much.
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