3 N. Ireland Boys Latest Victims of Deadly Hate

In a horrific arson attack that could propel this province over the brink or stun it into pulling back, three young sons of a Roman Catholic mother were burned to death in their beds early Sunday when a Molotov cocktail was lobbed into their home.

“Who could ever do anything like that? It must be animals,” said an outraged Mary McAntyre, who phoned firefighters after hearing an explosion and seeing flames quickly spread through the neighboring two-floor row house.

The deaths of the helpless Quinn boys, ages 7 to 10, plainly shocked a population that, after 30 years of communal violence and more than 3,600 lives lost in shootings and bombings, is no longer easily moved. British Prime Minister Tony Blair denounced the firebombers, who targeted one of the few residences occupied by a mixed couple in a largely Protestant housing estate here, as “vile and vicious sectarian murderers.”

“These people should not, and will not, thwart the will of the vast majority of people who believe in the peace process,” said Blair.

Though the past week has been one of escalating tension in this Connecticut-size province of Britain, with more than 1,900 disorderly acts registered by police, the youngsters in this town 40 miles northwest of the provincial capital, Belfast, were the first people to die in a criminal act widely linked to sectarian hatred.

Adding to the confusion was the fact that though mother Christine, 29, is Catholic, she has been living with a Protestant man, and her sons Richard, 10, Mark, 9, and Jason, 7, were going to the same primary school as other youngsters in the lower-middle-class Carnany Estate.

“They weren’t Protestants, they weren’t Catholics,” said Francis Quinn, the boys’ uncle. On Saturday night, the uncle said, the boys helped gather firewood for a neighborhood bonfire to celebrate a 17th-century military victory by Protestant King William of Orange.

Hours later, “they became a bonfire themselves,” Quinn said, his voice laden with emotion.

A fourth son, Lee, 12, was sleeping at a neighbor’s home. Mrs. Quinn and her boyfriend, Raymond Craig, managed to escape the blaze, as did another woman living in the house. Craig escaped by jumping out a window and reportedly tried to get back in the burning building to save the children. Like their mother, he was hospitalized with undisclosed injuries.

Aghast at such a loss of young life, politicians and community leaders, Catholic and Protestant alike, urged the people of Northern Ireland to pause and reflect, and called for an immediate end to the quarrel that has been the catalyst for the unrest, a thwarted plan by the Protestant fraternal organization the Orange Order to stage its traditional yearly parade in the town of Portadown.

“For me, this changes everything. There are things clearly much, much more important than marches or opposing marches,” Ronnie Flanagan, chief of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the local police force, said.

Northern Ireland’s first minister, David Trimble, himself a longtime member of the Orange Order, demanded for the first time that his fellow Orangemen, who have been massed on the outskirts of Portadown since July 5, halt their protest immediately and go home.

“The only way in which they can clearly distance themselves from these murders, show to the world that they repudiate those who have murdered young children . . . is now to leave the hill at Drumcree parish church,” Trimble said Sunday afternoon.

He appeared at a news conference with his moderate Catholic deputy, Seamus Mallon, giving a display of unity during the first crisis that Northern Ireland’s fledgling government, in which power is shared between Protestants and Catholics, has had to face.

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Within hours of the firebombing, which authorities said occurred around 4:30 a.m., the Orange Order itself clearly was split. David Jones, spokesman for Portadown area lodges, disavowed any connection between violence by Protestant extremists and loyalist paramilitaries and his organization’s resolve to march through the Catholic Garvaghy Road area. Sunday night, his lodges voted unanimously for their “brethren” to stand their ground and remain indefinitely at Drumcree church. But their chaplain, the Rev. William Bingham, said the march wouldn’t be worth it now.

“After last night’s atrocious act, a 15-minute walk down Garvaghy Road by the Orange Order would be a very hollow victory because it would be in the shadow of three coffins of little boys who wouldn’t even know what the Orange Order is about,” Bingham said from his church pulpit.

In a very real sense, the clock is ticking, because today is the day for an important annual celebration by Northern Ireland’s Protestants. Though bonfires were lighted Saturday night to mark the anniversary of William’s victory at the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, traditional marches are taking place today, a day later than most years, to preserve the sanctity of the Sabbath.

At least 50,000 people are expected to parade in locales throughout Northern Ireland, and twice that number could then converge on Portadown, an unprecedented crowd that could overwhelm police and British troops now keeping the peace there.

Since the standoff in Portadown began, homes, businesses and automobiles of some Catholics in Northern Ireland have been bombed.

Nightly, bands of thugs have clashed on Portadown’s rural outskirts with security forces and have tried repeatedly to storm the barbed-wire fences and other defenses hastily built to bar them from Garvaghy Road.

Sunday morning, police in Portadown said they had been the brunt of attacks from a “hooligan element,” 200 strong, that tried to batter its way overnight through the defenses erected by security forces. The mob reportedly hurled gasoline bombs, skyrockets, ball bearings and bricks, and police counterattacked with volleys of plastic riot-control bullets.

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In Ballymoney, under a gray, rainy sky, a stream of neighbors and friends came throughout the day Sunday to the burned-out Quinn home to pay their respects and express their sorrow. In front of the dwelling, mourners left bouquets, stuffed animals and cards.

“A price too great to pay for a 15-minute walk,” read one card, signed “A Protestant family.”

“In loving memory of three little angels killed by cowards,” said another.

McAntyre, the woman who called firefighters, said neighbors tried to get into the blazing house to save the children, whom one neighbor said could be heard screaming. But “it went up too quick. People couldn’t get in,” she said.

She remembered seeing the boys’ mother, silhouetted by flames, standing by the second-floor window, shouting for someone to come save her sons.

“They didn’t stand much of a chance, did they?” McAntyre said.

In Belfast, the government-appointed independent Parades Commission, which refused the Orangemen’s first application to march along Garvaghy Road, Sunday afternoon turned down a new request from the organization to march.

Meanwhile, in a bid to defuse tensions, Catholic residents of the Lower Ormeau Road area of Belfast, another flash point of troubles during Protestant marches, announced Sunday that they plan to hold a counterdemonstration today that will be “nonconfrontational.”

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Dahlburg reported from Portadown and Miller from Ballymoney.