LVF leader's son sentenced

Father of accused remains an icon for some loyalists

The son of murdered Loyalist Volunteer Force leader Billy Wright has been given a suspended jail term after admitting riotous assembly in Portadown.

Stephen Michael Wright, 17, from Seagoe Gardens, Portadown, County Armagh, also admitted throwing a petrol bomb.

The court heard Wright had become involved in trouble in Portadown in July last year as a 'one-off' incident.

The town has become the centre of tension at the height of the Protestant marching season for several summers, during which the Orange Order Drumcree parade has been banned from a nationalist area.

A defence lawyer told the court that the year 2000 was the first year Wright had remained in Northern Ireland instead of spending the summer with his natural mother in New York.

He said Wright hoped to return there to live.

Giving Wright an 18-month young offenders' centre sentence, suspended for two years, Judge Geoffrey Foote said in this particular case he would take a "lenient view".

Wright's father was shot dead in the Maze prison by members of the republican paramilitary Irish National Liberation Association, shortly after Christmas in 1997.

Billy Wright formed the hardline LVF, breaking away from his former Ulster Volunteer Force unit in Portadown after that organisation declared its 1994 ceasefire.