Stone-Throwing Mob Attacks Catholic Soccer Fans Buses Carrying Players’ Families Attacked In Protestant Town
A stone-throwing mob attacked Roman Catholic soccer fans from Belfast on Saturday as they arrived in the largely Protestant town of Portadown to see a game.
Visiting fans of Cliftonville, a north Belfast team supported by Catholics, ripped up seats from their buses to use as shields against stones, bottles and other projectiles when they were ambushed just before the start of the game at Portadown’s Shamrock Park, 25 miles southwest of Belfast.
Catholic players’ families, including children as young as 4, were caught up in the attack by hard-line pro-British Protestant protesters. One of the buses was badly damaged.
“There was sheer hate in their faces,” said Cliftonville fan Liam Murray. “I’ve never seen hate like it in my life.”
More than 10 people were injured, among them five police officers.
The buses were turned back for the fans’ safety and the game got under way. But at half-time, Cliftonville players worried about their families on the buses refused to return to the field. The game was stopped.
The violence was the latest of at least four bids by Protestants to prevent Cliftonville fans from attending road games. The protesters say they are retaliating because Catholics tried to reroute traditional pro-British Protestant marches away from Catholic areas this summer.
The most serious confrontation occurred in Portadown in July, when police blocked marchers for five days before allowing them through the town’s main Catholic enclave. Protestants rioted widely before the police backed down; four nights of Catholic rioting followed the reversal.
There had been fears of similar violence at a Protestant march Saturday overlooking a Catholic area of Londonderry, 60 miles northwest of Belfast. But the march went ahead with little trouble.
Pro-British Protestants marched along a wall above Londonderry’s most militant Catholic area after riot police prevented protesters from blocking their way.
The Catholic crowd shouted vulgarities and threw a few bottles and rocks at the marchers as they passed along the 30-foot-wide wall, but no serious injuries were reported.
About 200 members of the Apprentice Boys of Derry, the city’s proBritish fraternal order - accompanied by a fife-and-drum band and carrying banners emblazoned “No surrender!” - paraded along the western wall and completed a route they were prevented from taking 10 weeks ago.
Last time, fearing violent resistance by Catholics, the British army closed off entrance points to the wall with iron fencing and barbed wire. This time, the army erected tarpaulin screens along the wall to prevent residents below in the Bogside, the city’s oldest Catholic district, from seeing the Protestant procession.
Police offered a compromise in which 13 Catholic protesters could have held placards beside the parade. But protest leader Donncha MacNiallais, a paroled Irish Republican Army prisoner, refused to accept any police terms.