Protestants, Police Clash In N. Ireland Angry Because They Couldn’t March Through Catholic Area
Riot police forced mobs of drunken Protestants out of downtown Londonderry on Saturday after the Protestants pelted police with rocks and bottles during a pro-British march.
About 200 Protestants threw projectiles at police armored cars and Catholic onlookers at the end of the annual Apprentice Boys of Derry parade. They were angry that police prevented the fraternal group from marching in three other predominantly Catholic areas of the British-ruled province.
The procession commemorates Londonderry’s resistance against a besieging Catholic army in 1689 and is one of the most tense dates on Northern Ireland’s calendar.
In an earlier bid to wreck the parade, two masked gunmen hijacked a van in the Catholic Galliagh district and abandoned it along the march route on the Craigavon Bridge. No explosives were found.
The street mayhem capped the march of 12,000 Apprentice Boys, accompanied by thunderous fife-and-drum bands, from Londonderry’s mostly Protestant east side, across the River Foyle, into the walled city center and back.
A Catholic man suffered a head wound when Protestant spectators hurled scores of bottles and rocks across the Diamond, Londonderry’s main square.
The violence started when a Protestant band from Belfast broke ranks and attacked a few Catholic spectators. Police intervened, but a mob of Protestant spectators, many of whom had been drinking heavily since early in the day, joined the melee.
Several Protestants were injured as police, backed by rows of armored cars, shoved them into the city center’s only Protestant neighborhood, the Fountain. Londonderry’s Altnagelvin Hospital said it had treated two Protestants with head and leg wounds.
No sooner had officers quelled the Protestant mob than Catholic youths on another side of the Diamond began pelting police armored cars.
Police revved their engines and charged on foot to try to drive the youths outside the city’s 17th-century walls, but they held their ground. The youths pulled scarves over their faces to avoid identification before charging police, ripping side mirrors off one armored car and firing rocks and bottles against police shields.
A police commander who called through a bullhorn for the crowd to disperse was drowned out by catcalls.
Gerry O’Hara, a leading Londonderry member of the IRA-allied Sinn Fein party, told the youths to go home.
“You’re not going to do any damage to those boys with bottles and stones,” he said. “The (Protestant) loyalists just made themselves look bad. Don’t make our side look bad.”
But the youths, some as young as 8, resumed their harassment after O’Hara left.