Belfast children walk gauntlet of hate
TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 04 2001
FROM OLIVER WRIGHT IN BELFAST
SCREAMED at, spat at and pelted with milk bottles, the young girls of the Roman Catholic Holy Cross Primary School in Belfast began their new school year yesterday with a horrifying lesson in sectarian hatred.
The children, some as young as four, walked a gauntlet of abuse behind grilled Perspex barriers and row upon row of armoured police. They were clearly bewildered and scared. Parents on the other side of the barricades yelled obscenities at them as their mothers gripped their hands and pulled them close.
By the time the girls arrived for lessons many were too traumatised to stay and had to be escorted home, sobbing uncontrollably.
The flashpoint along the troubled loyalist and nationalist divide in north Belfast had been widely expected. The dispute started after republicans were accused of deliberately knocking over two men on ladders who were putting loyalist flags on lampposts outside the school before the marching season in June.
In reprisal, loyalists blockaded the entrance to the school, preventing Catholic children from entering, resulting in several nights of fierce rioting. The dispute was temporarily abated by the summer holidays.
Loyalists vowed to prevent Catholic children from walking through their area to school and nationalist people refused to take a longer route that would have avoided the trouble.
The police were also prepared, and just after dawn a convoy of Jeeps, lorries and armoured personnel carriers roared up to the school and began erecting a security cordon to allow the children through.
At first only a handful of residents emerged, bleary-eyed, to hurl abuse, but as time wore on the police had to push back several hundred increasingly angry demonstrators to let the children pass.
When they came, they were met by a torrent of abuse and missiles. “Go away, you Fenian scum,” one woman shouted. “You’re not welcome here.” Others spat while milk bottles bounced off the 300 yards of metal-grilled Perspex put up to protect the children.
Close to tears, Eirinn Keenan, 7, watched as insults gave way to violence. “This woman grabbed a Catholic woman and tried to beat her,” she said. “I was too close to her and I was scared. They were shouting all these names at me.”
A 28-year-old called John, who would not give his surname, said that he had walked through the barricades with his niece, Mary, 7. “I will never forget what they called us,” he said. “And to do that to children is disgusting. This will put back relations for years.”
Anne Tanney, the Holy Cross Principal, described the protesters as sick, adding: “A lot of the children were too traumatised to stay here. No child should have to endure that.”
Alan McQuillan, the RUC Assistant Chief Constable for Belfast, warned the protesters that his officers would be there every day if necessary to ensure that pupils got to class.
The dispute spread on to the streets of the Ardoyne last night, with police coming under attack from a hail of stones, petrol bombs and bottles. Several officers were injured trying to push back more than 200 nationalist and loyalist rioters and shops and property were damaged.
There were few signs of any resolution to the impasse at Holy Cross. At a meeting of governors and parents a decision was made to try again today to get their children past the barricades. “We want to go in through the front door and not round the back,” Roisin Delaney, whose children go to the school, said. “They won’t stop us taking our children.”
thetimes.co.uk |
