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Friday, 11 January, 2002, 10:37 GMT
Belfast riots go back centuries
![]() Divisions in the Ardoyne date from the city's early years
Think the sectarian battles in Belfast emerged with the start of the Troubles some 30-odd years ago? Think again - such tensions have existed almost as long as the city itself.
Once again violence has flared in Belfast, centred on Ardoyne.
"This has been a feature of Belfast as long as there has been a Belfast," says Martin Melaugh, of the University of Ulster's Cain (Conflict Archive on the Internet) project. "In the Shankill Road riots in 1969, people were throwing stones across the same stretch of road that their forebears had 100 years beforehand." Long-standing divisions These tensions date from the early 19th Century when Belfast was rapidly transformed from a collection of villages into a thriving industrial city.
In the north and west of the city, around the Ardoyne and Falls Roads respectively, small Catholic and Protestant enclaves formed a patchwork of orange and green where close neighbours were often bitter enemies. In these tinderbox areas, seemingly minor incidents had the potential to escalate rapidly. "Those who originally laid out and developed Belfast would no doubt recognise the lines of division - for instance that the Falls Road was a Catholic area and still is," Dr Melaugh says. 'Violence, outrage' Although the worst riots in living memory were in 1971 - the year the UK Government introduced internment as sectarian violence began to escalate - the city's flashpoints had erupted as long ago as the mid-19th Century. In 1836, the Orange Order was banned by the Party Processions Act after numerous clashes with Catholics (a move repealed in 1872).
The British-appointed commissioners found that such parades led to "violence, outrage, religious animosities, hatred between classes and, too often, loss of life". They concluded that the parade's purpose that year had been "to remind one party of their triumph of their ancestors over those of the other and to inculcate feelings of Protestant superiority over their Roman Catholic neighbours".
Michael Poole, co-author of the book Ethnic Residential Segregation in Belfast, told BBC News Online that such violence led to further segregation as those in the minority sought safety by moving to be among their own. Thus the Troubles of the 19th Century stretched into the 20th, with sporadic outbursts of violence - such as gun battles in the 1920s - in the lead-up to the particularly traumatic years from 1971. Despite taking steps towards peace, sectarian divisions in Belfast have worsened since the IRA ceasefire in 1994, according to early 2001 census returns released to the Northern Ireland academic, Peter Shirlow. He found that 66% of people living in estates are in an area where the population is either 90% Protestant or 90% Catholic. Ten years ago, 63% lived in such communities.
For many others, it is galling that these divided neighbours cut themselves off from each other in a time when power-sharing is operating at Stormont.
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11 Jan 02 | N Ireland
10 Jan 02 | N Ireland
10 Jan 02 | N Ireland
03 Sep 01 | N Ireland
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