BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) — Irish Catholic militants attacked riot police Thursday in a divided corner of Belfast as the most polarizing day on Northern Ireland's calendar reached a typically ugly end — and yet managed, amid the smoke and chaos, to take a few tentative steps toward compromise.

Many hours of violence in the hardline Catholic Ardoyne district marked the fourth straight year that the area has descended into anarchy following the annual passage of Protestant marchers from the Orange Order brotherhood.

Massive Orange parades across Northern Ireland each July 12 — an official holiday that commemorates the Protestant side's victory in 17th-century religious warfare — often stoke conflict with Catholics, who despise the annual marches as a Protestant show of superiority.

But in recent years, as British authorities have restricted the Protestants' march routes, a drab stretch of road that passes a row of Ardoyne shops has become the focal point for province-wide animosity. There, the decades-old battle for supremacy between the British Protestant majority and Irish Catholic minority wages a yearly test of wills, with heavily armored police stuck in the middle.

A British government-appointed Parades Commission sought to defuse the Ardoyne conflict this year by ordering the Orangemen to march along Crumlin Road by 4 p.m. local time, three hours sooner than normal. Protestant leaders grudgingly accepted the deadline rather than mount a later standoff, and all sides agreed this gesture kept a bad situation from turning even worse.

The Parades Commission and police also permitted Ardoyne residents for the first time to stage their own march on the road a few hours later in a bid to balance competing rights. Protracted violence by masked Ardoyne youths followed that second gesture.
As the rioting headed toward midnight, police said nine officers had been wounded and two rioters arrested. They said rioters had hijacked and burned three cars and were tossing occasional Molotov cocktails at police lines. Officers responded by firing a half-dozen plastic bullets, blunt-nosed cylinders designed to knock down the target without penetrating the skin.

The sectarian showdown on Crumlin Road demonstrated how, despite a two-decade peace process and five years of a joint Catholic-Protestant government, Northern Ireland at grass-roots level still faces a long, uncertain journey to achieve reconciliation.

Indeed, Protestant officials of the unity government took part in the Orange parade, while some of their Catholic counterparts stood with the Ardoyne protesters. And yet both sides' leaders said the dispute would do nothing to derail their continued cooperation the rest of the year.

Orangemen, unable to reach Ardoyne on foot by the Parades Commission's 4 p.m. deadline, considered standing their ground with police in a bid to force their march through in the evening. Their leaders insisted they had to defend their right to freedom of assembly, fearing that once banned from a particular stretch of road they would never be permitted to return.
http://www.mail.com/news/world/1423364-belfast-catholics-riot-token-orange-march.html#.7518-stage-hero1-4

Sad little country.

Orange is a funky color but why hate on it?

What the Orangemen are doing in Northern Ireland is similar to what the KKK did in the USA back before the Civil Rights Era.

The parade that the Orangemen have each year is their way of saying,
"Ha ha. We Englishmen conquered you Irishmen!"

Although the labels "Protestant" and "Catholic" are commonly used to describe the opposing sides in Northern Ireland, the ongoing dispute isn't a religious one, although religion did play a role at the beginning.

Oh shucks and here I sit with no British flag to burn. Darn.

I don't much care for catholics and their protecting their pedophiles.

However, I remember hearing the British oath once or twice.
The sun will never set on the British Empire.
Sounds like a plan to be in every country and have a say in how it's run.

Barry gave them that right in the G20 summit.

I have decided to start a new tradition for the fourth of July in my front yard. Instead of fireworks, I am going to have a British Flag burning ceremony.

I am going to invite everyone in town to come.

We will pass out small British flags and set them on fire and throw them into a barrel.

The pedophiles discovered in the Catholic Church are not truly religious men. They are frauds who have infiltrated the church to give it a bad name and they worship Satan.

Why then, does the church pay off the victim, avoid having them prosecuted, relocating them, denying the situations occur and covering up the ones they can?

The corruption goes to the tippy top. Just as it does in politics.

The Roman Catholic Church isn't the topic of this thread.

The topic is the Orangemen's tradition of having a parade every 12th of July. Technically, they are celebrating the outcome of a battle that resulted in Ireland being ruled by England's King William of Orange.

The religious element is due to the fact that the people of Ireland were (in general) members of the Roman Catholic Church, and the rulers of England were nominally* Protestant. Back then, the government of England did not recognize the right of people to worship as they saw fit (which is why the Pilgrims moved to North America).

As I see it, the 12th of July in Northern Ireland is the opposite of the 4th of July in the USA.

Whereas the 4th of July is a celebration of independence, the 12th of July is a celebration of dominance. That is why the Catholic residents of Northern Ireland become hostile whenever the Orangemen have their annual parade, because it is a reminder that the Catholics lost their independence.

Now, I could be mistaken about these things.

(*I say that the rulers of England were nominally Protestant because their goal of conquering Ireland conflicts with New Testament teachings.)