Flag furor grips Northern Ireland
Protestant militants target political party
Northern Ireland leaders appealed for calm Thursday after Protestant militants attacked offices and a home connected to the most compromise-minded political party over its support for reducing the display of British flags on government buildings.
The overnight violence in two Belfast suburbs came on the eve of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s planned visit Friday to the capital of the British territory. It underscored how divided Northern Ireland remains despite the broad success of a peace process that has stopped paramilitary violence but done little to bring down barriers between rival British Protestant and Irish Catholic communities.
Protestant hardliners have responded violently to a vote Monday in the Belfast city council to reduce sharply the flying of the British flag atop the city hall. The Alliance Party, which represents middle-ground opinion and seeks support from both sides of the community, holds the balance of power on the council. Alliance voted with the Catholic side to take down the flag except for 18 official days annually; the Protes- tants had wanted it to stay up 365 days a year.
Several hundred Protestant protesters broke through the city hall’s gates Monday night and injured 15 policemen defending the building. On Wednesday night more than 1,500 Protestants rallied in the northern suburb of Carrickfergus demanding that the British flag be restored atop Belfast’s municipal headquarters. The protest soon descended into attacks on riot police. Four officers were injured and responded with volleys of plastic bullets, flat-nosed cylinders designed to knock down rioters with punishing blows. They also arrested four suspected rioters.
Some in the crowd set fire to the nearby Carrickfergus office of Alliance, destroying it. And to the east of Belfast, more vandals poured gas on the locked front of another Alliance office in Bangor, but police said a passing police patrol spotted the attackers and forced them to flee before they could light a fire.