Indigenous Irish Catholics burned out as British colonial marchers gather

Angelique Chrisafis:

In the dead of night on the smart north Belfast cul-de-sac, a river of burning oil had scorched everything in its wake. The roof of one house had caved in and a children's playhouse, which four children had slept in a few days earlier, was a burnt-out shell.

If they had been there at 1am, when arsonists set an oil tank alight, causing two more to explode and sending a fireball through the edge of the estate, they would have been burned alive like their pet rabbit.

"We can't stay here now," said the children's father, Peter McCall, as the smell of smoke hung in the air. The McCalls are now abandoning this middle-class idyll of the new Northern Ireland.

The image of parents waking to the crackle of burning, wrenching children from their beds and throwing them over fences to safety is a throwback to the Troubles. Attacks still occur in working-class areas and on the homes of migrant workers. But in a leafy new mixed development of Catholics and Protestants, where most children attend the local integrated school, it is not supposed to happen.

When a group of youths told Catholic children from the estate "You are invading our territory and your houses are going to burn tonight", no one took it seriously.

Police are investigating a motive for Monday's attack in Old Throne Park. Sinn Féin said it was attempted murder, a sectarian act by loyalists to stoke tensions during the marching season, which began with violence last weekend and continues with the contentious Whiterock parade in Belfast tonight. This could mark the start of a fraught summer, the party warned.

When a Catholic church was burnt by arsonists in Portadown this week, a local priest appealed for no revenge attacks.

The first major parade of the Protestant marching season ended in chaos last weekend after Catholic demonstrators threw bottles and bricks and clashed with police after the return leg of the Orange Order's Tour of the North passed the nationalist Ardoyne shops in north Belfast.

This rundown and embittered interface between Protestant and Catholic communities who live behind dividing "peace walls" is a flash point of tension every year. This area of north Belfast suffered the most murders of the Troubles and the loyalist protests outside Holy Cross school four years ago still play strongly in people's minds.

Northern Ireland's chief constable, Hugh Orde, said the disturbances, in which 18 police officers and 11 others were injured, should serve as a "wake-up call" for the marching season.

Father Aidan Troy, the priest who led Catholic children to school during the Holy Cross dispute, warned that tension had descended to "the subhuman" and if the Irish or British governments did not intervene soon, someone could be killed.

More evidence that the only way to bring lasting peace to the north of Ireland is to relocate the British colonists back to Britain where their ancestors came from.