82 policemen injured in N Ireland

Only six months after the British government handed control of the police in Northern Ireland to local officials, the worst rioting in years has left 82 police officers injured in Belfast, the provincial capital, including a woman officer who was hospitalized in stable condition after a concrete slab was dropped on her head from an overpass.

The rioting reached a peak on Monday in the north Belfast district of Ardoyne, triggered by one of the most emotive occasions in the calendar, the annual July 12 marches by the Orange Order.

The order, a Protestant fraternal organization, has been a bulwark of Protestant — and British — supremacy in the six northern counties of Ireland. It stages its marches on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when the victory by the Protestant English king, William of Orange, secured British dominion in Ireland for more than 200 years.

Hundreds of rioters in Ardoyne battled police with petrol bombs, bricks, metal bars and planks on Monday after police in riot gear moved in to remove a group of about 100 protesters who had staged a sit-in to prevent the Orange Order marchers from making their return passage through a predominantly Roman Catholic neighbourhood.