Northern Ireland Riots Test Peace Process
Northern Ireland Riots Test Peace Process
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
Youths gesture at police as they gather in the Short Strand area in East Belfast.
Youths gesture at police as they gather in the Short Strand area in East Belfast. Photographer: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
Northern Ireland is enduring some of its worst rioting in a decade, heightening sectarian tensions as the region prepares for the climax of the marching season that every year tests the peace process.
Over two nights starting June 20, shots were fired and masked rioters threw petrol bombs in east Belfast, a traditional Protestant stronghold in the city, as police tried to prevent them entering the Catholic Short Strand estate.
The Ulster Volunteer Force, a Protestant terror group, coordinated the violence, police say. The eruption damped the celebrations for Northern Ireland golfer Rory McIlroy, who won the U.S. Open on June 19, and cast a shadow over the region’s efforts to emerge from recession.
“These riots are the last thing Northern Ireland needs as we are out there competing for international business,” Glyn Roberts, chief executive of the Northern Ireland Independent Retail Trader’s Association, said in a telephone interview. “We are in the headlines again for all the wrong reasons.”
The unrest adds to the pressures on the region’s assembly in which parties representing both Protestants and Catholics share power. Unemployment has more than doubled and house prices have fallen around 40 percent since 2008.
Against that backdrop, the region’s leaders are pushing the U.K. government for a reduction in the company-tax rate to revive an economy that’s still battered by three decades of violence at the end of the last century.
Skirmish
About 400 people were involved in the rioting and dissident republicans shot a press photographer amid skirmishes in the areas, police said.
Police fired almost 70 plastic-baton rounds, and the violence left dozens of homes in the Short Strand estate and nearby Protestant streets with broken windows as rioters attacked each other and police.
Petrol bombs left scorch marks on walls and roads, as rioters pelted missiles at police from a side street with a mural commemorating the Titanic, the ship that sank after hitting an iceberg on its maiden voyage in 1912 and was built in the east Belfast shipyard, Harland and Wolff.
Everybody “will be horrified with what’s happening,” Peter Robinson, leader of the pro-U.K. Democratic Unionist Party and Northern Ireland’s first minister, told reporters in Belfast. “They will recognize the reputational damage that it is doing.”
It’s unclear what’s behind the outbreak of violence, Alistair Finlay, assistant chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, told RTE radio yesterday. He said he “couldn’t pinpoint a single incident.”
Trouble
The UVF, which killed about 425 people during the conflict that largely ended with a peace deal in 1998, decommissioned its weapons two years ago. A split has now opened up within the organization, sparking the latest violence, according to Peter Shirlow, a politics lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast.
The power-sharing assembly was revived in 2007, with former political enemies pledging to work together. Since then sectarian violence has abated in the region, which is majority Protestant with a minority Catholic community.
The trouble may yet spread. Northern Ireland’s marching season culminates on July 12, commemorating a 17th-century victory by Protestant over Catholic forces at the Battle of the Boyne. Many Catholics traditionally leave the region at that time. The Orange Order, a Protestant-only organization with around 40,000 members, organizes around 3,000 such marches between April and September.
“It isn’t looking good,” Shirlow said in a telephone interview. “There is a schism within the UVF. Often that leads to attacks on Catholics. It’s a big test for the assembly. Once the can of worms is opened, there is a capacity for the violence to spread if it isn’t stopped quickly.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Colm Heatley in Belfast at cheatley@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Colin Keatinge at ckeatinge@bloomberg.net
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