Northern Ireland Is Burning

Jul 13 2011           Jump To Discussion

BELFAST – Riots erupt in N. Ireland, setting parts of neighborhoods ablaze, bringing back memories of a violent past.

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Northern Ireland’s annual day of Protestant marches reached a fiery climax on Tuesday as Catholics youths lashed out at police.

Many Irish Catholics call the Orange Order marches held on a Catholic/Protestants boarder road in Belfast, provocative and insulting. The OO is a Protestant brotherhood whose yearly July 12 demonstrations celebrate 17th-century military triumphs over Catholics. The Catholics are in minority in Belfast and the marches often result in a violent response.

Known as “The Twelfth” is a national holiday in Northern Ireland that is despised by most Catholics.

Hundreds of mostly teenage Catholics cover their faces with masks and hoods and wage running street battles with police on the narrow streets of Ardoyne, a hard-line Irish nationalist neighborhood of red-brick rowhouses in north Belfast.

The confrontations, which continued for several hours into the night, underscored how Northern Ireland’s 1998 peace accord has failed to heal communal wounds that run decades deep.

Prior to 1998 violent fighting between mostly Protestant loyalists who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom and Irish nationalists, mainly Catholics, who want it to be part of a united Ireland, tore the region apart during a 30 year period known as the “Troubles.”

Police force was required to use plastic bullets and water guns to drive the Catholic militants apart and end Tuesday night’s standoff.

 

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