BELFAST, Jan 11: Sectarian rioting abated on Friday in a run-down area of Belfast after two nights of fierce violence, allowing Catholic girls to attend school without major incident.

But tensions remained high after a night when Catholic and Protestant youths hurled rocks and petrol bombs at police and soldiers keeping them apart in the worst rioting in months.

“Every child got home safely, every parent got home safely and I mean all children and everyone got home safely and that’s what’s important,” said Father Aidan Troy, chairman of the governors of the Holy Cross girls’ primary school.

He was speaking at the end of the school day when some 150 pupils went home.

The rioting, originally sparked by an argument between a Catholic woman and Protestant woman as parents went to collect children from Holy Cross, showed how far efforts have yet to go to end 30 years of conflict between Protestants and Catholics which has cost 3,600 lives.

Police said at least 30 police and three soldiers were injured on Thursday night as hundreds of pro-British Protestants and pro-republican Catholics, who want the British-ruled province to join Ireland, fought a pitched battle with police.

One of the soldiers received acid burns to the face and one policeman a head wound. But when rioting ended after midnight the remainder of the day was quiet, a police spokesman said.

But tensions simmered, though at a much lower level, during the school day along the Ardoyne Road where the Holy Cross school is located, as Protestants who live there and Catholics who take their children to school there exchanged angry words.

At one point, police intervened when a group of Protestants and a group of Catholics wanted to walk down the road at the same time. The groups were separated by police, with one group walking down one side and the other group across the way.

“There is absolute hatred between certain sections in north Belfast,” assistant chief constable Alan McQuillan told an interviewer as the postmortem began. “We can restore law and order, but we cannot make people like each other.”

Protestants, who mounted a 12-week-long protest last year aimed at Catholics attending the Holy Cross school, said they had deliberately avoided mounting fresh protests near the school because it was no longer the main focus of grievance.

Protestants felt their protest backfired last September when pictures of terrified Catholic girls were flashed around the world.

“There has been a notion that this centres around a dispute over Holy Cross School this week,” said Billy Hutchinson, a hardline Protestant politician who is a member of the Progress Unionist Party, affiliated with a loyalist militia.

“It was a sectarian argument that started on the (Ardoyne) road — this was never a dispute this week about Holy Cross,” Hutchinson said.—Reuters