Belfast Mourns Protestant Boy's Death
BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) - Roman Catholics and Protestants united briefly in prayer Friday over the death of a Protestant teen-ager, the lone fatality in a week of riots and raw sectarian clashes outside a Catholic girls' school.
Britain's secretary of state for Northern Ireland, John Reid, led an effort to defuse tensions in divided Ardoyne, where Protestants spent most of the week menacing Catholics walking to school through the Protestant part of the north Belfast neighborhood.
On Friday, Protestants turned their backs in silence as Catholic parents escorted their children to the front of Holy Cross Primary, their route lined with armored personnel carriers, British soldiers and riot police. None of the Protestants hurled insults, rocks or homemade grenades as they did earlier in the week.
Some of their community's religious leaders joined the Catholic governor of the besieged school in a prayer for Thomas McDonald, the 16-year-old who was fatally crushed by a Catholic driver during rioting in a nearby neighborhood Tuesday.
Thomas was buried Friday amid harrowing scenes of grief. His mother, Pauline, nearly collapsed at the spot where he died, which was covered with floral tributes from friends. His younger brother Stephen cried as he rested his head against the coffin.
The 32-year-old Catholic driver charged in the death, Allison McKeown, appeared in court Friday via a television link after the dead boy's father had tried to attack her in court Thursday. And Catholic youths later threw bottles and stones at Protestants collecting the floral tributes from the roadway, demonstrating how tense relations between the communities remain.
Nonetheless, both sides seized upon the funeral as a chance to back off and cool down tempers.
Reid, who met Catholic parents Thursday night and planned to speak with Ardoyne Protestants on Saturday, worked with leaders of Northern Ireland's Catholic-Protestant administration to put together a special aid package for Ardoyne. While many details remained to be worked out, they announced late Friday their intention to oversee immediate mediation and a longer-term infusion of finances and other resources into the troubled district.
Some were hopeful that any continued Protestant demonstrations outside the Catholic school would be peaceful.
``Residents have got control of their anger. You're going to see a more measured protest from now on,'' said Stuart McCartney, a Protestant social worker who insisted his community had never meant to terrify Catholic schoolgirls. ``This community was expressing its anger over the many years of attack from the Roman Catholic community.''
Several Protestants said Friday they were fleeing their part of Ardoyne. Among them was Margaret McKinley, 73, who has lived in the same house for 62 years.
``My nerves is wrecked,'' she said as relatives loaded her furniture into a van. ``Bottles knocked my windows in. It's no good me sitting there on my own. This whole community is being purged.''
U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Friday the department's director of policy planning, Richard Haass, will travel to Northern Ireland next week to meet with political leaders.
The long-planned trip was not related to the unrest in Ardoyne, he said, though ``recent events'' would be discussed.
Catholic politicians said most attacks were by Protestants against Catholics and they appealed to Britain to punish the Ulster Defense Association, an outlawed Protestant group, for its role in the past week's violence. One option would be to re-imprison more UDA men paroled under terms of the 1998 peace accord.
Reid acknowledged many UDA members, who are supposed to be observing a 1994 cease-fire, were involved in attacking police and Catholics, but said the UDA cease-fire should continue to be recognized in hopes that bloodshed could be kept to a minimum.
Declaring the UDA cease-fire over would not be ``a magic wand that would stop sectarian attacks and remove the risk of damage and death to people,'' he said. ``We could end up in a situation where more people are in fact in danger of death.''
Originally published September 07, 2001.
