Orange parade rioting leaves 88 injured

Nearly 90 people were injured in serious rioting in north Belfast after a contentious Orange Parade, police said today.

The Police Service said about 80 officers were hurt, one seriously, and about seven civilians, including two journalists.

The Crumlin Road and other streets around the nationalist Ardoyne area were strewn with the debris of violence today, after nationalist protesters launched attacks on the security forces after an Orange Lodge parade had passed by.

Local priest Fr Aidan Troy, who had worked in the community to try to ensure a peaceful day, said: “I feel a huge disappointment and a huge sadness.

“I have been out and looked at the streets this morning and it says failure. It all went so horribly wrong.”

He said no one had won and, yet again, there had been "the betrayal of this community".

The security forces had attempted to hold back nationalist protesters as hundreds of Orangemen marched along the Crumlin Road for the return leg of their parade.

Even though senior republicans urged youths not to attack police and troops, bricks and suspected pipe bombs rained down from rooftops as the rioting broke out shortly before 8pm. A car was also hijacked and set on fire close to police lines.

Officers used water cannon and fired several rounds of sponge-tipped plastic bullets in a bid to quell the violence.

Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams said: “When the police moved in what I think was quite a reckless manner, they took management completely away from the stewards. They brought the water cannon in too quickly. We should have been allowed to keep order.

“In a situation where people on the front line like myself, Gerry Kelly, different MLAs and Fr (Aidan) Troy were completely soaked on six or seven different occasions.”

North Belfast Democratic Unionist MP Nigel Dodds said it was utterly deplorable that once again a totally peaceful, lawful parade was attacked by republicans on a main arterial route.

“The scenes of intense violence which has left so many police officers and members of the press injured are a scandal and a disgrace.”

He said the use of blast bombs “clearly demonstrates premeditated, organised violence on the part of republican paramilitaries”.

There had been a number of other attacks on Orangemen and their bands in North Belfast, said Mr Dodds, adding: “Either Sinn Féin/IRA cannot control this violence or do not wish to control it. Either way, it raises serious questions about the future of the political process.”

The Orange Order called on the Parade Commission to ban all future protests at the Ardoyne.

A spokesman for the order’s leadership said the latest rioting proved that the Commission’s policy of “constantly appeasing” hard-line republican residents by granting them the right to protest at the Ardoyne, was “threatening the stability of Northern Ireland and putting the lives of police officers at risk”.

The Order said: “The rioting happens so often that the Ardoyne has become synonymous with serious, orchestrated violence. Do we have to wait for people to die before the Parades Commission acts to put a stop to it?”

The Order said it noted that the latest trouble in both North Belfast and Derry had broken out after parading Orangemen, adhering to the Commission’s rulings, had left the scene. "The Twelfth was just an excuse – the truth is these thugs are addicted to violence.”

The Order said was time the Parades Commission and the Northern Ireland Office recognised “we will not be blackmailed into abandoning our cultural traditions by those who have no regard for human rights other than their own”.