Orange march sparks riot in Belfast

BELFAST, Northern Ireland – Irish Catholic militants attacked riot police Thursday in a divided corner of Belfast as the most polarizing day on Northern Ireland’s calendar reached a typically ugly end – and yet managed, amid the smoke and chaos, to take a few tentative steps toward compromise.

Many hours of violence in the hard-line Catholic Ardoyne district marked the fourth straight year that the area has descended into anarchy following the annual passage of Protestant marchers from the Orange Order brotherhood.

Massive Orange parades across Northern Ireland each July 12 – an official holiday that commemorates the Protestant side’s victory in 17th-century religious warfare – often stoke conflict with Catholics, who despise the annual marches as a Protestant show of superiority.

But in recent years, as British authorities have restricted the Protestants’ march routes, a drab stretch of road that passes a row of Ardoyne shops has become the focal point for province-wide animosity. There, the decades-old battle for supremacy between the British Protestant majority and Irish Catholic minority wages a yearly test of wills, with heavily armored police stuck in the middle.

A British government-appointed Parades Commission sought to defuse the Ardoyne conflict this year by ordering the Orangemen to march along Crumlin Road by 4 p.m. local time, three hours sooner than normal. Protestant leaders grudgingly accepted the deadline rather than mount a later standoff, and all sides agreed this gesture kept a bad situation from turning even worse.

The Parades Commission and police also permitted Ardoyne residents for the first time to stage their own march on the road a few hours later in a bid to balance competing rights. Protracted violence by masked Ardoyne youths followed that second gesture.

As the rioting headed toward midnight, police said nine officers had been wounded and two rioters arrested. They said rioters had hijacked and burned three cars and were tossing occasional Molotov cocktails at police lines. Officers responded by firing a half-dozen plastic bullets.