Belfast, Northern Ireland – Catholics demanded sterner restrictions on the Orange Order, the Protestant brotherhood at the center of rioting this week in Belfast, after the group’s leaders rejected any responsibility Wednesday for the street chaos.
Leaders of the 50,000-strong fraternal group – once central to political life in Northern Ireland but increasingly on the defensive – staged their first news conference since Protestant rioting exploded across Belfast and several towns Saturday over a restricted Orange parade.
As the mayhem subsided Wednesday, the Police Service of Northern Ireland catalogued the toll from four nights of rioting: 146 homemade grenades hurled, 116 vehicles burned and 81 police officers wounded.
The riots were the most widespread waged by the Protestant majority in nearly a decade.
Police say members of two major outlawed groups, the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defense Association, were behind the gun and grenade attacks.
Both anti-Catholic gangs are supposed to be observing a 1994 truce in support of Northern Ireland’s peace accord.
But the governor, Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, on Wednesday ruled that Britain no longer recognized the existence of the Ulster Volunteer Force’s half of the truce.
Hain conceded the move, which was also tied the group’s killing of four Protestants this summer in a criminal feud, was largely symbolic. But he emphasized that Britain was going to take an increasingly tough line on any group, Protestant or Catholic, that didn’t renounce violence.
The Orange Order blamed the violence on the police, the British government and the joint Catholic-Protestant panel that imposed the parade restrictions.
