Northern Irish determined riots won't shatter peace (News Feature)

By Fiona Smith Jul 16, 2009, 12:07 GMT

London - The street violence simmering since Monday in the nationalist area of Ardoyne in Belfast has brought Northern Ireland back to scenes reminiscent of its darkest hours.

A total of 24 police officers have been injured while under attack from blast bombs, petrol bombs, stones and even gunfire.

The response has been a determination that the violence, thought to have been orchestrated by dissident republicans, should not derail Northern Ireland's hard-won peace process.

'The democratic institutions and the peace that we all worked so hard to achieve are being challenged by a tiny and unrepresentative group of people with no mandate and no support for their actions,' said Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen, condemning the violence.

'They will not succeed,' he added.

In March, dissident republicans killed two soldiers and a policeman.

Cowen said the enduring image of that week in the North was of Northern Ireland's First Minister (unionist) Peter Robinson and (nationalist) Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness standing alongside the chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), united in their determination that the North would not be pushed back into the 'dark days of the past'.

Cowen emphasized that substantial progress has been made in 2009 on loyalist decommissioning, policing and North-South co-operation.

The images of stone-throwing youth, petrol bombs and police in riot gear are nothing new in association with the July 12 parades which celebrate the victory of the Orange King William over the Catholic King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Since this was the turning point for Protestant supremacy in Northern Ireland, the parades are considered by the Catholic nationalist community to be incendiary in themselves.

There has been an unconvincing attempt to rebrand the event as Orangefest, a family and tourist festival, which has been granted public money as a celebration of heritage.

However, the reality is that most people in Belfast see 'the twelfth' as a triumphalist and tribal celebration with attendant drunkenness and bad behaviour. Many leave the region to avoid it.

Marches through nationalist areas have traditionally been a major source of trouble with disputes over routes routinely escalating into violence.

The Parades Commission, a quasi-judicial independent body, was set up in 1997 in an attempt to regulate parades and resolve disputes, but has little success with remaining flashpoints such as the Ardoyne area and the notorious Garvahy Road.

Nationalist Sinn Fein party leader Gerry Adams, warned against hysteria over the riots.

'Let's get all of this in proportion, there were about 100 parades yesterday, there are 3,000 Orange parades annually, there are about six contentious parades and disturbances ... involved a very, very small minority of people'.

He called for direct dialogue between Orange officials and his party at local level to identify, and, if possible, resolve contentious parades.

Along with other prominent Sinn Fein figures, he denounced the violence as sectarian, reprehensible and organised by dissident republicans

Although dissident republicans have been widely blamed for orchestrating the violence, it is believed that many of participating youths are motivated more by boredom than politics.

Ardoyne community leader and parish priest Gart Donegan said that rioting had become 'a form of recreation' for some of the young people involved.

Assistant chief constable Alistair Finlay said of the troublemakers: 'They are clearly all criminals - attributing them to one group or a number of groupings is difficult and not terribly productive.

'There were people working there together to create the right conditions to seek to attack police and portray Northern Ireland in a way that nobody else seems to want.'

Finlay said police would be reviewing video evidence of the violence and stated that young people had got caught up in the 'frenzy and emotion' of the whole situation.

'We have not seen it on the streets of Northern Ireland for some years, we don't want to see it again,' he added.

With the riots in the Ardoyne still going on and the marching season set to go on all summer, it is not certain that Northern Ireland has seen the last of the rioters yet.