THE POLICE Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) has blamed criminals intent on damaging the peace process for the most severe rioting seen in Belfast since 2005.
Assistant chief constable Alistair Finlay said children and teenagers under the criminals’ control were involved in the violence that flared after a controversial Orange parade passed Ardoyne in north Belfast.
A total of 21 police officers were injured in clashes across the North.
The most serious incidents occurred in Ardoyne, where nine officers were injured and 14 new-style plastic bullets were fired at rioters who hijacked and burned vehicles. Bricks, blast bombs, petrol bombs and fireworks were used against the PSNI.
Firearms were deployed by some officers after a shot was fired at police lines.
Assistant chief constable Finlay, the most senior officer in the city, said children and young people were being directed by criminals who wanted to derail the political process. “It was an extraordinarily dangerous situation,” he said yesterday.
Referring to those he alleged were behind the violence he added: “They moved into the area and exploited those opportunities in the way they interacted with youths, children and young people,” he said.
“Police feel it was orchestrated by a few who clearly want to detract from the progress that was made. They are clearly all criminals – attributing them to one group or a number of groupings is difficult and not terribly productive.
“There were people working there together to create the right conditions to seek to attack police and portray Northern Ireland in a way that nobody else seems to want.
“We have not seen [orchestrated rioting] on the streets of Northern Ireland for some years, we don’t want to see it again,” he added.
Police confirmed that a firearm was found in Ardoyne on Monday by children and later handed over to the PSNI. It is now being forensically examined.
Ardoyne priest Fr Gary Donegan concurred with police claims. “Myself and many people were looking at people last night that we’d never seen in the area before in our lives. It was as if people had been bussed into the area for this very purpose and that this was being very much orchestrated,” he said.
His claims were made amid a verbal war between Sinn Féin and dissident republicans over the cause of the trouble. Senior Sinn Féin members, including Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly, denounced the trouble and accused the Orange Order of not working to back the political process or tackle sectarianism.
Breandán MacCionnaith of republican socialist group Éirígí denied dissident involvement and blamed Orange Order provocation for the trouble.
Mr Adams said about six contentious parades led to disturbances that involved “a very, very small minority of people . . . being exploited by some of these so-called dissident groups.”
The rioting was “wrong and reprehensible” he added.
“My biggest frustration is that thus far the Orange Order has contributed nothing to the peace process,” he alleged.
“The Orange Order still refuses to talk to Sinn Féin. They talk about being a Christian organisation, about neighbourliness, and I don’t dissent from any of that and I don’t say any of this to undermine the good decent people who were involved in the Orange, but why on earth can’t they come forward and meet us?”
However, Mr Mac Cionnaith said the violence was the inevitable result of what he called the “depressingly predictable use of state violence to force an unwanted sectarian march through a nationalist area”.