Belfast Catholics riot over Protestant parade

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-07-14 11:49

BELFAST, Northern Ireland: Masked and hooded Belfast Catholics hurled gasoline bombs, fireworks and other makeshift weapons at police Monday as the most bitterly divisive day on the Northern Ireland calendar reached an ugly end.

A masked youth prepares to throw a stone at police officers in the Ardoyne area of North Belfast , July 13, 2009. Rioters in Northern Ireland attacked police with bricks, bottles and other missiles in several places on Monday, wounding at least three officers on a day of parades by the pro-British Orange Order, police said. [Agencies]

Several rioters and at least seven officers were injured, none seriously, when Irish nationalists in Ardoyne, a militant Catholic enclave of north Belfast, tried to block a parade by the Orange Order, Northern Ireland's major Protestant brotherhood.

Tens of thousands of Orangemen spent Monday mounting hundreds of similar parades across this British territory, almost all of them trouble-free, in an annual stress test for the province's fragile peace.

More than 1,000 Orangemen and their accompanying bandsmen eventually did march down the main road past Ardoyne to the beat of a lone drum - but only after riot police fought an hourlong street battle backed by a surveillance helicopter and three massive mobile water cannons.

At one point, masked Catholic rioters on store rooftops directed a deluge of Molotov cocktails, bricks and golf balls on riot police below. The officers were protected with flame-retardant suits, helmets and shields.

Later, as the water-cannon gunners sought to take rioters' legs out from under them, Catholics wearing scarves over their faces took cover behind low brick walls and post boxes. They threw rocks, bricks, bottles and even planks of wood that bounced harmlessly off the armored sides and metal-grilled windows of the water-cannon vehicles.

The Ardoyne Catholics' showdown with police continued long after the Orangemen had passed through.

Police said a gunman fired at least one live round at police lines but missed. Rioters also stole at least two vehicles, set them on fire and pushed them toward police lines. Officers responded with plastic bullets.

A senior Belfast policeman, Assistant Chief Constable Alistair Finlay, condemned the anti-Orange rioters as offering "the worst possible face of Northern Ireland - a face of bigotry, sectarianism and intolerance."

These were the worst riots in Belfast since 2005, when the same Protestant parade triggered much more intense and dangerous riots on the same road. Then, more than 100 police officers were wounded amid a hail of homemade grenades.

But the aftermath of that violence also illustrates how street clashes rarely rattle wider peacemaking politics in Northern Ireland. Weeks after those 2005 riots, the outlawed Irish Republican Army (IRA) disarmed and renounced violence, paving the way for the 2007 formation of a new Catholic-Protestant government here.

Northern Ireland's "Twelfth" holiday typically raises community tensions to their highest point of the year as British Protestants celebrate centuries-old victories over Irish Catholics.

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