Northern Ireland’s police commander, Chief Constable Matt Baggott, blamed leaders of the Orange Order brotherhood for inciting running street battles in two parts of Belfast that lasted six hours and subsided early Saturday. He called the group’s leaders reckless and said they had had no plan for controlling the crowds they had summoned.
The fraternity’s annual July 12 marches always raise tensions with the Roman Catholic minority here. In each of the previous four years, violence has broken out after an Orange parade passed by the mainly Catholic district Ardoyne in north Belfast, the most bitterly divided part of the capital.
