BELFAST: Hatred, fear and mistrust erupted on the streets of north Belfast again this week, as a 48-hour orgy of rioting hammered home how deeply divided parts of Northern Ireland remain.

Rival Protestant and Catholic factions blamed each other for starting the violence, while politicians, police and community leaders in the flashpoint district struggled for answers as to why the latest trouble occurred.

“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.”

North Belfast is one of the cradles of the violence that has dogged Northern Ireland. A quarter of the 3,600 people who have lost their lives in the 30-year conflict between Catholics and Protestants were killed in this small corner of the city.

It’s a run-down neighbourhood made up of a patchwork of Catholic and Protestant enclaves — some divided by ugly “peace lines” — with rival communities living cheek-by-jowl in an atmosphere of tension and mutual mistrust.

In recent years, the Protestant population, once the clear majority in this part of the city, has been declining while the Catholic numbers have grown.

Chris O’Halloran of the North Belfast Interface project says there are 26 purpose-built peace lines — fences or walls separating the two communities — and an estimated 25 “invisible borders” in an area around two miles (five km) square.

The district suffers from high unemployment and poor housing, a fertile recruiting ground over the years for guerrilla groups on both sides, and some say more than 30 years of strife have created a culture of “recreational” violence.

It’s an explosive mix, where seemingly trivial disputes often escalate into outbreaks of fighting or stone-throwing, and occasionally full-blown rioting.

“BEER IN ONE HAND, BOMB IN THE OTHER”: “What is depressing is that tensions in the area are so great that even the smallest incident can spark off large scale disturbances,” the province’s pro-British First Minister David Trimble told the BBC.

“There are too many people coming out almost for a form of recreational rioting — you see youths with beer bottles in one hand and petrol bombs in the other.”

Certainly a good number of young men on both sides of the divide appear to be spoiling for a fight, and lurking in the background are shadowy guerrilla organizations who remain powerful despite the ceasefires most say they are observing.

Police, who came under sustained attack from petrol and acid bombs, homemade “blast bombs”, stones, bricks and bottles say there was clear evidence of a degree of orchestration.

In the heart of all this is the Holy Cross Primary school, a Catholic girls’ school in a Protestant enclave that last year became a symbol of north Belfast’s divisions.

The spark that ignited the latest bout of rioting appears to have been an altercation between two mothers — one Protestant and the other Catholic — as Catholic parents went to collect their children on Wednesday afternoon.

Protestants said the trouble started earlier in the day, when a group of Catholics removed a wreath placed in memory of a Protestant taxi driver murdered in 2000 close to the unofficial line dividing two enclaves.

The other side said the Catholic woman was the victim of an unprovoked attack.

According to police, a crowd quickly gathered, and as more and more people on both sides were sucked into the confrontation the violence quickly escalated.

IMAGES OF TEARFUL CHILDREN: Holy Cross hit the headlines last autumn, shocking the world with television images of tearful children being guarded by troops and riot police as they were walked past jeering Protestant protesters on their daily journey to school.

Protestant residents living around the school said their protest was in response to intimidation from elements within the Catholic community who used the Holy Cross as cover to enter the other side’s territory.

Catholics said the protest was nakedly sectarian, and pointed to a spate of pipe bomb attacks on Catholic homes as evidence their Protestant neighbours wanted to drive them out.

Thus far the violence of recent days has not led to a resumption of school protest which was called off in November amid promises of greater community co-operation.—Reuters