Police firing plastic bullets and powerful water cannons forced Catholic militants away from a disputed Belfast road Tuesday as Northern Ireland's annual day of Protestant marches reached a fiery climax.
Catholic youths lashed out at police both before and after the marches by the Orange Order, a Protestant brotherhood whose yearly July 12 demonstrations celebrate 17th-century military triumphs over Catholics.
Many Catholics say the tradition is provocative and it often inspires a violent response from the province's minority.
Hundreds of mostly teenage Catholics, who covered their faces with masks and hoods, waged running street battles with police on the narrow streets of Ardoyne, a hard-line Irish nationalist enclave of red-brick rowhouses in north Belfast.
Police reported standoffs, smaller riots and the sporadic burning of hijacked cars in several other Catholic parts of this British territory. Several officers were injured, police said.
Communal wounds
The confrontations, which continued for several hours into the night, underscored how Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord has failed to heal communal wounds that run decades deep.
Three decades of fighting between mostly Protestant loyalists who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom and Irish nationalists, mainly Catholics, who want it to be part of a united Ireland tore the province apart during a three-decade period known as the "Troubles.
Near Northern Ireland's main M1 motorway, rioters hijacked a bus and tried to drive it into police lines but instead crashed into a sidewalk.
Riots were also reported in Newry and Armagh as well as the Markets area in central Belfast.
Catholic and Protestant politicians have called for calm in recent days and urged people not to go into the streets to protest against the parades.
"We must not allow the progress that has been made to be thwarted by those who want to drag us back to the past," Northern Ireland's First Minister Peter Robinson said.
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