Irish Catholic rioters attack police

BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) — Irish Catholic militants attacked riot police Thursday in a divided corner of Belfast as the most polarizing day on Northern Ireland’s calendar reached a typically ugly end — and yet managed, amid the smoke and chaos, to take a few tentative steps toward compromise.

Many hours of violence in the hardline Catholic Ardoyne district marked the fourth straight year that the area has descended into anarchy following the annual passage of Protestant marchers from the Orange Order brotherhood.

Massive Orange parades across Northern Ireland each July 12 — an official holiday that commemorates the Protestant side’s victory in 17th-century religious warfare — often stoke conflict with Catholics, who despise the annual marches as a Protestant show of superiority.

But in recent years, as British authorities have restricted the Protestants’ march routes, a drab stretch of road that passes a row of Ardoyne shops has become the focal point for provincewide animosity. There, the decades-old battle for supremacy between the British Protestant majority and Irish Catholic minority wages a yearly test of wills, with heavily armored police stuck in the middle.

A British governmentappointed Parades Commission sought to defuse the Ardoyne conflict this year by ordering the Orangemen to march along Crumlin Road by 4 p.m.. local time, three hours sooner than normal.

A car burns after Nationalist rioters clashed with Police Service of Ireland in the Ardoyne area of North Belfast, Northen Ireland.