Bomb Thrown at Catholic Schoolgirls

In a scene reminiscent of the worst days of U.S. school desegregation, Protestant extremists in Northern Ireland threw a homemade bomb at Roman Catholic girls and their parents walking to school Wednesday through a gantlet of hatred and riot police.

Two police officers were wounded in the blast claimed by an outlawed Protestant paramilitary group that calls itself the Red Hand Defenders. Politicians on both sides of the sectarian divide condemned the violence, but they seemed at a loss for solutions to the three-day standoff over Catholic families walking through a Protestant enclave in northern Belfast.

Since the new school year started Monday, the girls, ages 4 to 11, and their parents have been besieged by shouting, spitting and stone-throwing Protestants on Upper Ardoyne Avenue--a Protestant street leading to the front door of Holy Cross Primary School. None of the girls has been hurt.

Residents of the Protestant neighborhood in a largely Catholic area of Belfast, the capital of the British province, say they are routinely harassed by Catholics and have had enough. They want the Holy Cross students to take a different road to the school, one that leads to its back door.

The Catholic parents say they have a right to use the front door and have ushered their petrified children through the seething protesters.

On Wednesday, children and parents alike burst into tears and ran screaming into the school when they heard the explosion.

“I’m really horrified and disgusted that this kind of thing could happen to children,” said Holy Cross Principal Anne Tanney. “To think that someone would throw a blast bomb [homemade explosive] is unbelievable.”

Even hard-line Protestants who support the residents’ grievances called the protest “unacceptable.”

“I am ashamed to be associated with these people,” said David Ervine, a politician with links to the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force. “The protest is wrong. These people are besmirching their own name. They are allowing themselves to be seen as the Serbs of Northern Ireland.”

Three Protestant militants were detained in connection with the blast, and Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary, John Reid, cut short his vacation to return to Belfast today to try to steer the dispute off what he called “the path to barbarism.”

The Red Hand Defenders is widely believed to be a cover name for the Ulster Defense Assn., a Protestant paramilitary group that claims to be observing a cease-fire in support of the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement. More than 200 of its members were released from prison under the accord.

Leaders of the Irish Republican Army’s political wing, Sinn Fein, say the blast at Holy Cross is but the latest attack in a UDA campaign of violence. In the last 10 months, said Richard McAuley of Sinn Fein, 200 bombings and shootings have targeted Catholics, leaving three dead, one of them a Protestant youth mistaken for a Catholic.

The UDA also is said to be feuding with other Protestant paramilitary groups, such as the Ulster Volunteer Force.

UDA flags fly from lampposts on Protestant blocks of the Ardoyne neighborhood.

Some Catholic community and school leaders have been urging Holy Cross parents to use the rear entrance of the school until a solution to the territorial dispute can be negotiated. But after a meeting Wednesday night, many parents said they would resume their march down Upper Ardoyne Avenue today.

“The parents have to keep walking up the Ardoyne road, because if they don’t, where will it end?” said one mother who has been ushering her kindergartner to school.

Protestant residents also dug in their heels, and political leaders said they thought cross-community negotiations were unlikely any time soon.

Northern Ireland’s Protestant and Catholic communities have been fighting each other for more than 30 years over the province’s union with Britain. Protestant unionists and loyalists want to remain part of Britain, while Catholic nationalists and republicans want to unite with the Irish Republic.

The cross-community government set up under the peace agreement is on the verge of collapse over unresolved issues, particularly the failure of the IRA and Protestant paramilitary groups to disarm.

But the two sides joined in condemning the violence at Holy Cross school.

“This sectarian strife, which places children in the front line, is creating an extraordinarily dangerous situation for all of us,” said the joint statement from the leaders of the provincial government.

Protestants and Catholics also have been unable to agree on reforms to Northern Ireland’s predominantly Protestant police force. In a twist this week, it was Protestants who complained of police brutality and Catholics who said the police had been protecting their right to walk down the street.

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Special correspondent Frank McNamara in Belfast contributed to this report.