N. Ireland Riots Shatter a Fragile Peace Process

It is 1:30 a.m. Saturday on Springfield Road in a Roman Catholic section of west Belfast.

Yellow flares launched from the Royal Ulster Constabulary police compound give the night an eerie glow.

Two boys, about 15, light the wicks on homemade gasoline bombs, rush into the street and hurl them over the compound’s wall. The bombs burst on netting protecting the station.

From gun ports, police fire back with plastic bullets. The boys duck behind metal sheeting and run away, laughing. But one demonstrator, a man about 20, is struck in the head, and an ambulance arrives to take him away.

Later, the attack and counterattack are repeated through the long, violent night in Northern Ireland.

Vehicles are torched, stores burned, cities scarred. In Londonderry, the first death is reported in a week of clashes over a Protestant nationalist parade that have left this province’s painstaking progress toward a peaceful settlement in shards.

Belfast householder Joseph McLeary, 35 “and going on 50,” watches the rioting from his front fence, surveys the blackened debris on the street and observes: “We’re doing this to show we’ve had enough discrimination as second-class citizens. One law for the Protestants, another for us.

“What does this do to the peace process? I don’t know that it ever started around here. And when the RUC let the Orangemen march in Portadown Thursday, that was the end as far as we’re concerned.”

McLeary’s sentiments were echoed this weekend by Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists alike, as well as players outside Northern Ireland who lament the fact that a parade could spark an uproar so virulent as to threaten the province’s fragile hopes for a peaceable future.

“It scarcely seems credible that the surge of optimism that has surrounded the peace process for the past two years could be crushed so forcefully as it has been in the past five days,” Dublin’s Irish Times said Saturday.

But other observers say the peace process has been cursed for some time, and the parade dispute was merely the breaking point.

The week began with the RUC prohibiting a march of the Protestant Orange Order from moving through a Catholic section of the town of Portadown, a mainly Protestant community southwest of Belfast. The parade is held annually to celebrate the Protestant victory of William of Orange over Catholic forces in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

Amid rising unionist demonstrations and rioting, RUC Chief Constable Hugh Annesley reversed his decision and allowed the march to go through the Catholic enclave, his officers forcibly ejecting sit-down protesters.

Many saw this as a capitulation in the face of unionist pressure tactics. Earlier in the week, British Prime Minister John Major had promised that the government would not accept “mob rule.”

Annesley’s about-face set off a round of Catholic nationalist rioting that has continued through this weekend across the province, the worst in many years.

As John Ryan, a political science professor at Trinity College in Dublin, put it: “Passions and prejudices have been raised on all sides. Sectarian tensions have been inflamed. The militarists on all sides have been strengthened, and the prospects of political accommodation and eventual settlement are in tatters.”

On Saturday, thousands of Catholic mourners took to the streets of Londonderry after 35-year-old Catholic Dermot McShane died in rioting in Northern Ireland’s second city. Witnesses said McShane was run over by an army jeep early Saturday and died later at Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry, 70 miles northwest of Belfast.

The new violence comes after a long period of relative peace in Northern Ireland, the calmest since religious sectarian troubles erupted in 1969.

The Irish Republican Army in February broke a cease-fire that existed among paramilitaries here since August 1994, but their bomb attacks have been confined to England.

Meanwhile, peace talks had been slowly evolving under the chairmanship of former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell as all sides struggled to reconcile the various political interests of Northern Ireland’s sectarian communities.

But this week’s parade dispute left the province’s republican minority feeling that they had “been treated shamefully and betrayed,” said Cardinal Cahal Daly, religious leader of Ireland’s 4 million Catholics.

And Gerry Adams, leader of the IRA’s political arm, Sinn Fein, declared that the peace process was “in absolute ruins.”

He said Major is to blame and called on him to disband the RUC for allowing the Orange Order marches to proceed.

Signaling a rift with the British government, Irish Prime Minister John Bruton informed Major by phone on Friday that he believed the parade decision was “very mistaken” and stressed that he was “gravely concerned” over the events.

But longtime political observers here believe that many of those involved in the peace process--including Major, Bruton and President Clinton--have been over-optimistic, even naive, about the realities on the ground.

“The whole matter of marches this year,” one political analyst said, “has been a cry of outrage by the Protestant unionist community that they are being sold out by the Major government in London.

“They believe that over the years their interests have been ignored. And that, conversely, the republicans--Sinn Fein and the IRA--have shot their way to the bargaining table. That the IRA’s use of violence has effectively been condoned in Dublin and Washington.”

A central figure in the week’s events has been David Trimble, head of the Ulster Unionist Party, who had been feted by Clinton at the White House and described by U.S. officials as a reasonable man.

Trimble made an appearance in Portadown early in the crisis and condemned Chief Constable Annesley for stopping the march.

“It is now clear that David Trimble is almost as hard-lining as [firebrand unionist] Ian Paisley when it comes to asserting unionist supremacy here,” one official said.

Another observer lamented: “This was the great opportunity for the RUC to show that the rule of law would apply to everyone in the province--particularly the Orangemen. With the RUC giving in, the unionists know they have called the government’s bluff and can do as they please.”

In addition to the wounded peace process, the province has suffered millions of dollars in short-term physical destruction and more in long-term damage to the tourist trade and industrial investment.