Rioters fired at police and hurled grenades and gas bombs Wednesday in sporadic violence over Britain's refusal to allow an annual Protestant march through a Catholic neighborhood.
Leaders of Northern Ireland's 80,000-member Protestant brotherhood have vowed to stand their ground at an Anglican church outside Portadown, 30 miles southwest of Belfast, until British authorities let them march down nearby Garvaghy Road past the main Catholic enclave. Protesters there first tried to impede the march in 1995.Under orders from a government-appointed Parades Commission, British security forces erected extensive barricades to block the July 5 march. The ensuing standoff has brought rioting to Northern Ireland for the third consecutive summer.
Police and soldiers came under gunfire, but no casualties were reported as they confronted mobs early Wednesday in Protestant east Belfast; the Protestant section of Antrim, west of Belfast; and Newtownards, east of Belfast.
And in Protestant Newtownabbey and Carrickfergus to the north, rioters threw grenades and gasoline bombs at police and army lines.
Arsonists attacked a Catholic elementary school in Lisburn, a southwest Belfast suburb, and a shelter for homeless people in east Belfast, forcing its occupants to flee. Wednesday morning, army bomb-disposal experts defused a grenade attached to the gateway of a Catholic high school in north Belfast.