82 police injured in Belfast’s 2 nights of riots

The Irish are at it again… At the core of this conflict – religion, what else. This time it’s not Sunni versus Shiite Muslims, but Protestant versus Catholic Christians. In the end it’s all the same; religious zealots fighting over superstitious nonsense. TGO

Refer to story below. Source: Associated Press

BELFAST, Northern Ireland – Northern Ireland’s political and security leaders condemned Irish nationalist militants Tuesday who injured 82 police officers during two nights of rioting sparked by the province’s annual parades by the British Protestant majority.

While most of the officers sustained minor injuries like cuts and bruises, two remained hospitalized: a policeman wounded in the chest and arms by a shotgun blast, and a policewoman who had a paving stone dropped on her head from a shop rooftop above.

The rioting in working-class Catholic parts of Belfast and other towns came both before and after tens of thousands of Protestants of the Orange Order brotherhood marched at 18 locations across Northern Ireland in an annual show of communal strength. It was the worst rioting in Belfast since the same event exactly one year ago.

Politicians said the rioters, influenced by Irish Republican Army dissidents opposed to compromise, were chiefly motivated to attack the police themselves. IRA dissidents have focused in recent months on trying to lure police into ambushes, until now with little success.

Brian Rea, chairman of a joint Catholic-Protestant board that oversees Northern Ireland police, said the rioters “were intent on causing maximum disruption and inflicting terror on police and the wider community.”

Several Belfast roads remained closed Tuesday as workers cleared away the remains of the riots: blackened shells of cars that were stolen and torched; roadways littered with glass shards and scorched by impacts from Molotov cocktails; errant objects — wood planks, a beer keg, iron scaffolding, a child’s bicycle — that had been thrown at police; garbage cans lined up on a bridge and set on fire.

A moderate Irish nationalist lawmaker, Conal McDevitt, said most rioters were teenagers who lack any coherent political philosophy, only a desire to lash out at police.

“This seems to be as much about aping what they saw previous generations of so-called ‘hard men’ doing, than protesting or opposing an Orange march,” said McDevitt, who asked Catholics to tell police about the rioters living in their communities. “No community deserves to be dragged back into the past by a tiny minority who have no idea why they are rioting or what they want to achieve.”

Northern Ireland’s main rail line remained partly closed after Irish nationalist rioters in Lurgan, southwest of Belfast, tried to set fire to a train with 55 passengers on board. Nobody was hurt because the engineer drove the train away quickly. Passengers on all Dublin-Belfast rail services were being switched on to buses for the Northern Ireland half of the journey.

“If that train had gone on fire, there would have been a major disaster,” said John O’Dowd, a politician from the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party who represents Lurgan in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

In Northern Ireland’s second-largest city of Londonderry, a lone gunman using a nearby pub for cover fired at least five shots from a handgun at police Tuesday as they tried to extinguish a fire that had engulfed a police armored vehicle. Nobody was hurt, and police said the masked gunman escaped.

Police commanders planned to present video and photographic footage of Monday’s attacks on police officers to journalists later Tuesday.

Monday’s violence began in Ardoyne, a traditional IRA power base in north Belfast, where about 100 demonstrators tried to block one parade route while masked men and youths on side streets bombarded police with bricks, bottles, stones, Molotov cocktails and at least one homemade grenade.

Police said they fired about 70 plastic bullets during four hours of street clashes in Ardoyne.

Since 1998, a British-appointed Parades Commission has imposed restrictions on Orange marching routes to prevent the Protestants — accompanied by “kick the pope” bands of tattooed men playing fife and drum — from passing most Catholic districts.

Still, authorities have failed to negotiate alternative routes for some parades, including the one past Ardoyne’s row of shops on Crumlin Road. The thoroughfare connects one Orange lodge to central Belfast.

The disputed Ardoyne parade involves a single Orange lodge of about 30 men and an accompanying band of about 50 men and boys. But it attracts several hundred Protestant supporters to match the Catholic crowds opposed to it, with police caught in the middle each summer.

The Orange Order commemorates July 12 — also known as the Glorious Twelfth, an official holiday in Northern Ireland — as the date when their community, descended largely from 17th-century Scottish settlers, secured their place in northeast Ireland versus Catholic natives.

On July 12, 1690, the forces of Protestant King William of Orange defeated the army of his dethroned Catholic rival, James II, at the Battle of the Boyne south of Belfast.