Marching away from trouble

SOMETHING HAS GONE TERRIBLY AWRY when a 5-year-old joins a riot started by a paramilitary army. Yet last weekend in Belfast, a child just that age was seized for throwing stones at the police and returned to his parents.

Violence erupted in Northern Ireland once again as authorities prevented the Orange Order, the largest Protestant organization in the province, from parading past a Catholic neighborhood. From Saturday to Tuesday morning, furious battles between young Protestant men and the police took place on the streets of Belfast. According to police reports, two paramilitary groups, the Ulster Defense Assn. and the Ulster Volunteer Force, have fired shots at the more than 1,000 police officers and 1,000 soldiers deployed in the area.

Nobody ever said it would be easy to make peace in Northern Ireland. But nearly a month ago, the democratic process in that troubled region got a boost when the Irish Republican Army ordered its troops to surrender their arms through a verifiable process. The British government began scaling back its military presence in Northern Ireland immediately after the IRA statement.

Although blame for the present violence rests mainly with the leadership of the Orange Order, the silence of at least two key Protestant political leaders who could have helped head off the clashes gives them a share of the responsibility. The Rev. Ian Paisley, head of the Democratic Unionist Party, and Reg Empey, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, should immediately denounce sectarian violence as unacceptable.

Every year, starting in April and finishing around September, hundreds of parades take place throughout Northern Ireland, mostly meant to celebrate centuries-old Protestant victories over Catholics. When these parades go past Catholic neighborhoods, they often amount to little more than open and pointless provocations.

To avoid the anger and resentment that have resulted in the past, a commission was granted legal authority in 1998 to set the rules and change the routes of the parades. This has produced some minor skirmishes in the intervening years but nothing like the recent riots.

Even acknowledging that most of these parades serve no good purpose, forbidding them seems to be unenforceable -- such is the power of tradition, especially on a proud old island like Ireland. The only viable solution is to get political leaders to recognize equal rights for both communities, and to get Orange Order leaders to the table, negotiating directly with representatives of the communities through which it intends to march.