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| Europe |
| 82 policemen injured in N Ireland riots |
| 2010-07-14 |
| Northern Ireland's political and security leaders condemned Irish nationalist militants Tuesday who injured 82 police officers during two nights of rioting sparked by the province's annual parades by the British Protestant majority. While most of the officers sustained minor injuries like cuts and bruises, two remained hospitalized: a policeman wounded in the chest and arms by a shotgun blast, and a policewoman who had a paving stone dropped on her head from a shop rooftop above. The rioting in working-class Catholic parts of Belfast and other towns came both before and after tens of thousands of Protestants of the Orange Order brotherhood marched at 18 locations across Northern Ireland in an annual show of communal strength. It was the worst rioting in Belfast since the same event exactly one year ago. Politicians said the rioters, influenced by Irish Republican Army dissidents opposed to compromise, were chiefly motivated to attack the police themselves. Brian Rea, chairman of a joint Catholic-Protestant board that oversees Northern Ireland police, said the rioters "were intent on causing maximum disruption and inflicting terror on police and the wider community." Several Belfast roads remained closed Tuesday as workers cleared away the remains of the riots: blackened shells of cars that were stolen and torched; roadways littered with glass shards and scorched by impacts from Molotov cocktails; errant objects - wood planks, a beer keg, iron scaffolding, a child's bicycle - that had been thrown at police; garbage cans lined up on a bridge and set on fire. A moderate Irish nationalist lawmaker, Conal McDevitt, said most rioters were teenagers who lack any coherent political philosophy, only a desire to lash out at police. "This seems to be as much about aping what they saw previous generations of so-called 'hard men' doing, than protesting or opposing an Orange march," said McDevitt, who asked Catholics to tell police about the rioters living in their communities. "No community deserves to be dragged back into the past by a tiny minority who have no idea why they are rioting or what they want to achieve." Northern Ireland's main rail line remained partly closed after Irish nationalist rioters in Lurgan, southwest of Belfast, tried to set fire to a train with 55 passengers on board. Nobody was hurt because the engineer drove the train away quickly. Passengers on all Dublin-Belfast rail services were being switched on to buses for the Northern Ireland half of the journey. "If that train had gone on fire, there would have been a major disaster," said John O'Dowd, a politician from the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party who represents Lurgan in the Northern Ireland Assembly. In Northern Ireland's second-largest city of Londonderry, a lone gunman using a nearby pub for cover fired at least five shots from a handgun at police Tuesday as they tried to extinguish a fire that had engulfed a police armored vehicle. Nobody was hurt, and police said the masked gunman escaped. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #3 Ah, saints be praised, the boyos in the North always look forward to the Marching Day festivities. Gives everybody a chance to work off a years worth of pent up stress. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2010-07-14 09:53 |
| #2 The Irish sure know how to riot. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2010-07-14 09:23 |
| #1 Just wow. I thought that old fight had quieted down. I Thought they were living in harmony now. 82 police indeed. Young louts should be ashamed... really and truly, they don't want to go back to The Troubles. |
| Posted by: anon1 2010-07-14 04:52 |