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Violence flares outside school in Belfast
LONDON, JAN. 10. Rioting in Belfast on Wednesday forced the authorities to close a Roman Catholic girls' school that became a focus last fall of the province's sectarian hostilities.
The action was taken after Protestants jostled and spat on parents as they picked up their daughters at the school, Holy Cross Primary, on the second day of the winter term.
Three Catholics were taken to Royal Victoria Hospital with wounds from shotgun pellets, 17 police officers were injured and two Protestants were wounded by plastic bullets. A 13-year-old Protestant student who was riding a bus through the area was also hospitalised after being hit by a barrage of stones.
As darkness fell, mobs of Catholic and Protestant youths threw stones and flaming objects at each other as police officers in riot gear tried to keep the sides apart. The school is just inside the Protestant Glenbryn area, which borders the Catholic Ardoyne area, and British troops in battle gear had to be called out last year to escort the children to the school.
``It's back to lower than square one, if that can be possible,'' said Aidan Troy, chairman of the school's board of governors. ``It's beyond anything I could have imagined,'' he told a radio interviewer. ``The whole area is in absolute turmoil.''
He said the school had been able to bus the students past the confrontation and that none had been hurt. But he said they had witnessed the fracas, and he described them as ``too petrified, some of them, even to cry.''
The Catholic parents said they were attacked with no warning at the gates to the school by Protestants who were blocking their children's exit. The Protestants said they had felt provoked after someone removed flowers at a lamppost memorial to a Protestant taxi driver killed on the street two years ago.
A 12-week protest at the school in the fall, during which the military had to protect weeping youngsters as adults screamed abuse at them, reflected the sectarian hatreds that have persisted in Northern Ireland even as the province tries to put a 1998 peace agreement in place.
— AP
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