NEWS & VIEWS
from a CATHOLIC perspective

      BELFAST (CWNews.com) - Protestant gangs attacked police positions Monday night and Tuesday morning in Northern Ireland with guns, gasoline bombs, grenades, and rocks in an effort to force an end to restrictions on a planned parade through a Catholic neighborhood.

      The worst violence since the Good Friday peace accords in April resulted after the loyalist Orange Order was turned back from Garvaghy Road on Sunday during the annual parade which marks a 300-year-old Protestant victory over a Catholic king. The Order called on supporters to offer only nonviolent protests to the parade ban, but the violence continued to spread over a second night.

      The British army announced on Tuesday that it will deploy two more battalions of soldiers to Northern Ireland to quell the rioting. "Orangemen must realize that if this violence continues, it will only be a matter of time before we once again are following coffins," said David Trimble, a past defender of Portadown's Orangemen who is the newly elected minister heading Northern Ireland's power-sharing government. The parade ban elicited violence in 1996 and 1997 until the government capitulated and allowed the march to go through.