Boiling over

摘要

It was not a very big detour, but the 100-metre diversion last weekend of a Protestant march around a Catholic area threatens to push Northern Ireland's peace process a long way off course. The bricks and burnt-out vehicles that littered Belfast after three days' rioting by working-class loyalists conjured up the unrest of 20 years ago. Back then it was mostly Catholics fighting police and soldiers or Catholics fighting Protestants. This time it was Protestants fighting police and soldiers. There was a weary inevitability about this week's recriminations. Orangemen condemned the decision to reroute their march; the police condemned the Orangemen; the rioters condemned the police; America's envoy lamented the lack of Protestant leadership; and the main unionist party, the Reverend Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists, dismissed him as "damaged goods". The rioting came as the IRA is-supposedly-close to decommissioning its arms, now being gathered from across Ireland into a few dumps. That, in rum, follows a Republican promise in July to stop all criminal activity, a step Tony Blair praised with almost indecent haste as being of "unparalleled magnitude".