Belfast streets spawn a new generation of hatred

Around Ardoyne yesterday, crunching through the broken glass and surveying the street wreckage after yet another night of fierce rioting, the thought was unwelcome yet inescapable: a new generation is being blooded.

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Around Ardoyne yesterday, crunching through the broken glass and surveying the street wreckage after yet another night of fierce rioting, the thought was unwelcome yet inescapable: a new generation is being blooded.

North Belfast is witnessing the creation of the next wave of paramilitary gunmen. Today they are aged eight, their stones bouncing harmlessly off the army and police Land Rovers. The soldiers and the RUC look on them as a nuisance rather than a danger.

But give them a decade and, unless things change remarkably in the meantime, many of these children will know how to fire a rifle or revolver, will have learnt to manufacture and use blast-bombs, and know exactly how much sugar is needed in a petrol bomb.

The violence of Wednesday night and yesterday morning was mostly loyalists against the police. There were up to 700 rioters, many of them members of the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association, involved in the gun and bomb attacks that injured 33 RUC officers.

On other nights of this most violent summer and autumn, republicans have been to the fore, with hundreds of men and youths on the streets. Sometimes they clash with the security forces, sometimes they clash directly with Protestants. Police say this is the worst period of rioting since the time of the Bobby Sands hunger strikes 20 years ago.

This is very much a three-way war and always has been, with so many precedents that, by this stage, it has the sanction of history. Similar clashes have happened here, at exactly the same spot on the Crumlin Road, during the past two centuries.

In May 1922, in language that could easily have been used to describe this week's disturbances, a local newspaper reported "another wild outburst in Belfast. The whole area of the Crumlin Road was affected, the din created was terrific and a reign of terror prevailed. There were scenes of disorder of the wildest description." Crumlin Road is a no man's land, a main thoroughfare that forms a boundary where the two sides live in poisonous proximity. Large-scale peace lines enforce a degree of separation, but determined crowds can still get through.

In the 1920s, the IRA bombed tram cars carrying Protestant shipyard workers along the Crumlin Road. Loyalists, on occasion, boarded other trams and shot dead Catholic passengers. The backstreets, some of them today strewn with rubble, are also saturated in history.

An excellent recent book about the Belfast IRA in the 1920s tells of debates in Ardoyne IRA circles on the Irish Treaty. One junior IRA man told a senior officer he would join the Free State army because "what's good enough for Mick Collins is good enough for me".

Across the Crumlin Road, the adjoining Shankill Road district produced generations of recruits to underground organisations, not as well organised as the IRA but much more numerous. Its tough men became accustomed every few years or, in quieter periods, every few decades, to seizing pokers or guns or whatever and rushing off to do battle.

A lot of the Victorian back-to-back housing has gone now but ancient patterns persist. The paramilitary instinct is still there: an estimated 15,000 men wearing uniforms of some sort staged a parade down the Shankill Road a few weeks ago.

The psychology has changed. In the early part of the troubles, Ardoyne was viewed as a vulnerable ghetto that might be overrun by Shankill loyalists. Today, Ardoyne is bigger and more assertive, so that much of the recent violence has sprung from Protestant attempts to prevent its expansion.

But the expression of difference takes the same form: riots, kickings, bricks through windows, intimidation, warnings and sometimes gunfire. Centuries ago, these people were placed in political, economic and territorial competition that has set the scene for endemic, endless conflict.

Four months in a divided city

Mid-June: trouble flares in Ardoyne after loyalists claim republicans attacked a man raising a flag.

Loyalists then attempt to stop Catholic girls reaching Holy Cross primary school, which is in a Protestant area.

Late June: In one of many nights of rioting in north Belfast 10 police officers are hurt.

July: trouble subsides at Holy Cross school as summer holiday begins, but Gavin Brett, a 17-year-old Protestant, is shot dead by loyalists looking for a Catholic.

September: Holy Cross protests grow ­ a loyalist blast bomb injures RUC officers. A woman is charged with murdering Thomas McDonald, a 16-year-old Protestant, who died after he was knocked down at a sectarian flashpoint.

September: The Government tries to open dialogue between Holy Cross parents and protesters. Rioting worsens in Ardoyne and other troublespots.