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Weekend Sport: Friday Night Rioting
Life getting you down? Dead end job? Housing executive house crumbling? Kids asking difficult questions - perhaps like "Who's my dad?" Maybe you're just depressed because your fantasy of a United Ireland isn't shared by as many people as you thought. Then you might be interested in a new, largely teenage, craze which is sweeping through Ardoyne - rioting.
In a so called 'peaceful protest' missiles were hurled by nationalist protestors at police and marchers as the Orange Order's Tour of the North passed the Ardoyne shops. While the march doesn't actually pass any nationalist homes, these determined youths don't let that spoil their game, as they made their way down to the shops carrying their traditional 'protest' equipment (apparently stones, bottles, bricks and half a dozen petrol bombs) to 'protest' at some people walking down the road. Some have been said to have emerged from the same bar near the Ardoyne shops where riots started following Celtic's embarrassing defeat on the last day of the season that cost them the Scottish league.
When people see rioting and attacking police as a recreational activity something has gone seriously wrong in their upbringing. What's worse is that by the time they're 19 most of these kids will probably have offspring of their own and instill the same sort of ignorant bigoted attitudes in them!
A teenage girl had her arm broken but it will be some comfort to her that the rioters 'won' the match, suffering only 11 injuries to the PSNI's 18. I ask you, what sort of parents let a teenage girl go 'protesting' when they know the sort of scum that will be there stirring up trouble? Of course the parents will never accept the blame for this, I'm sure they'll blame someone else.
Question: With the Parade Commission ruling that march organisers have to list who is responsible for the parade, so that they can be disciplined of people accompanying the parade misbehave - are they applying similar rules to the protests? If so, what are they doing with the organiser of Friday night's "protest" at the Ardoyne shops?
Predictably Sinn Fein have blamed Protestants. It seems they're just blaming Protestants in general since Gerry Kelly has cited attacks on Catholics elsewhere as the cause of the rioting. So that's ok then!
Police are set to examine CCTV footage as part of their investigation.