Once More, With Feeling and Holy Water
Masked and hooded Belfast Catholics hurled gasoline bombs, fireworks and other makeshift weapons at police all night Monday as the most bitterly divisive day on the Northern Ireland calendar reached an ugly end. Several rioters and at least nine officers were injured, none seriously, when Irish nationalists in Ardoyne, a militant Catholic enclave of north Belfast, tried to block a parade by the Orange Order, Northern Ireland's major Protestant brotherhood. Tens of thousands of Orangemen spent Monday mounting hundreds of similar parades in an annual stress test for the province's fragile peace. Most passed peacefully, but a handful attracted violent protests that Catholic leaders blamed on Irish Republican Army dissidents opposed to Northern Ireland's joint Catholic-Protestant government. Gerry Kelly, a minister in that 2-year-old coalition from the major Catholic-backed party Sinn Fein, said the dissidents were pursuing an "anti-peace process and sectarian agenda"...