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MORE TROUBLES
JULY 12, 1996
TRANSCRIPT
Since Sunday, Protestant British loyalists have been trying to march their traditional Orange Day Parades through Catholic neighborhoods. Local police and the British army stopped them, and the angry Protestant crowds turned violent. Yesterday, the authorities changed their position, and that provoked a night of Catholic rioting. Today the parades went forward. Alex Thompson of Independent Television News reports.
ALEX THOMPSON, ITN: Ardoyne, North Belfast, an RUC officer set on fire by a petrol bomb. There were three policemen shot and injured, 900 baton rounds fired, at least thirty civilians injured, some seriously. Across Northern Ireland overnight, nationalist violence and response to the police decision to allow the drumkree march. Early evening on the Ormeau Road in Central Belfast and a police curfew, all side streets into the road blocked by police and army, all this 15 hours before an Orange Parade was due along the road through a Catholic area. Residents said they felt under house arrest to protect a loyalist parade.
WOMAN ON STREET: We're only the scum here where they're concerned.
MAN ON STREET: We can't get to work or nothing.
WOMAN ON STREET: We're family people here, rearing our children, and they're--till tomorrow--they're not coming down till tomorrow--why can we not--
MR. THOMPSON: The army joining an overwhelming show of strength condemned by residents, councillors, and MP's.
JOE HENDRON, Member of Parliament: That march must not be allowed through the Ormeau Road, and it would be wrong to do that. It would not only be offensive to the people of this area. It could cause trouble right across the North. We already have that trouble because of the great intimidators that we have had in street corners in every little town and village across the North of Ireland.
MR. THOMPSON: By late evening, the pall of smoke from loyalist bonfires hung over the Ormeau. Gerry Adams, kept out by police with no explanation for several hours; he was finally allowed in around midnight, giving interviews on the hoof. He'd come, he said, to reassure residents who'd invited him. The area did remain calm all night as attempts by SLDP politicians to re-route the parade came to nothing. By morning, Sean Beckett had had enough of a police land rover barricading his front door for 14 hours.
SEAN BECKETT, Ormeau Resident: I've asked the guy walking up and down the road with silver braid around his hat, could you arrange for a jeep to be moved, and he says, "No, it'll be moved when they want to move it."
MR. THOMPSON: 9 AM, with the march imminent, residents barricaded off their own street, replaced by media, human rights observers, and priests.
REV. PETER McCANN, Ormeau Parish Priest: Sinn Fein, IRA, National Front, Orange Order, no parade by anybody should be allowed through an area where they're not wanted.
MR. THOMPSON: 9:30, Gerry Adams looking on, and the parade was forced through. Seven lodges joining nineteen different rallies across Northern Ireland. Barricaded in, the residents' protest was deliberately kept small.
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