Angry Catholics Carry On Dusk-To-Dawn Protests

Roman Catholics rioted dusk-to-dawn Saturday in protests of Protestant marches through their neighborhoods. An army jeep crushed a man to death, and dozens of other people were wounded.

The chaos was at its worst in Londonderry, Northern Ireland’s second-largest city, where violence was the most intense since Catholic rioting began Thursday. It followed four days of rioting by pro-British Protestants angry that police originally vetoed their march plans for commemorating 17th-century battle victories over Irish Catholics.

At least 2,000 Catholics hurled rocks, bricks and gasoline bombs at police overnight in Londonderry, police said. The Catholic Bogside district was littered with the smoking wrecks of torched cars.

Appealing for calm, Londonderry’s senior police commander, Tom Craig, decried “the madness of a situation where, in the past week, the worst excesses of both communities have been seen in all their shame throughout the world.”

The Irish government was scathing Saturday in its criticism of the British response to Protestant rioting, straining relations between the two at a time when they are jointly overseeing multiparty peace talks. Leaders of the IRA-allied Sinn Fein party alleged that police have been far quicker to fire at rioting Catholics than they were Protestants.

More than 230 people - police and civilians - have been wounded since rioting began last Sunday. Dermot McShane, 35, was the first to die.

McShane, a Catholic, was run over by an army jeep early Saturday and died later at Altnagelvin hospital in Londonderry, 70 miles northwest of Belfast.

The jeep rammed a trash bin that rioters hid behind while lobbing gasoline bombs, said Craig, the assistant chief constable.

Craig said one of his officers tried to offer McShane first aid but another rioter slashed the officer’s face with a broken bottle. The gash required 19 stitches, he said.

Also Saturday in the Ballymurphy district of west Belfast, young people tossed gasoline bombs at a police-army barracks. They used metal bed frames to shield themselves from retaliation.

At one point, gunmen from two directions fired more than a dozen shots at the New Barnsley barracks near the so-called “peace line” that separates Catholic and Protestant districts. Police returned fire, spraying bullets into the walls of one apartment.

In north Belfast, three masked men identifying themselves as IRA members patrolled a Catholic district briefly before slipping back into the shadows. They were carrying Kalashnikov rifles and walkie-talkies.

It was a shift Thursday in police tactics that quelled Protestant rioting but brought furious Catholics into the streets. Caving in to a swelling mob of Protestants, police restrained Catholic residents of Portadown, 25 miles southwest of Belfast, to allow marches by the Orange Order, the province’s dominant Protestant fraternal group, through their neighborhood.

Irish Foreign Minister Dick Spring said Catholics’ confidence in the British government and police “is probably at an all-time low … because they see the police and the British government giving way to mob rule.”

Moderate Catholics made their indignation plain, too. The Social Democratic and Labor Party, Sinn Fein’s larger rival for Catholic votes, announced Saturday it was withdrawing from a forum in Belfast intended to complement the peace negotiations.

The SDLP had been the only Catholic voice at the weekly forum because Sinn Fein had refused to take part. Sinn Fein is barred from the actual peace talks, scheduled to resume Tuesday in Belfast, because in February the Irish Republic Army resumed using violence in its campaign against British rule.

Martin McGuinness, the senior Sinn Fein figure in Londonderry, demanded that police stop firing plastic bullets, 4-inch-long cylinders that travel at 200 mph.

Police said they have fired more than 2,000 plastic bullets in the past two days. That compares with about 650 fired during four nights of wider rioting by Protestants that ended Thursday.

IRA supporters said many of the injured Catholics in Londonderry were ferried across the nearby border to sympathetic doctors in the Irish Republic. Those hospitalized in Northern Ireland risk arrest for rioting.

It’s standard practice in Londonderry, where Northern Ireland’s modern “troubles” began in August 1969 with street clashes similar to this week’s. Then, as now, they were triggered by a Protestant march.