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The Ulster Unionist leader has called for an end to street protests after loyalists threw a petrol bomb into a car as a policewoman sat inside.
Police are treating the attack close to Alliance Party MP Naomi Long's east Belfast office as attempted murder.
It follows loyalist protests about last week's decision by Belfast City Council to fly the union flag at city hall on designated days, not daily.
The violence is to be raised in the House of Commons later on Tuesday.
On Monday at 19:35 GMT, a gang of six men smashed the back window of the policewoman's car, which was parked on the Upper Newtownards Road, and threw in the bomb. The woman escaped unhurt.
In the past week, as trouble flared across Northern Ireland, 29 police officers were injured and 38 people arrested
BBC News - Police car petrol-bombed near MP Naomi Long's office
These are dangerous times in Northern Ireland, a long-divided corner of the United Kingdom that is supposed to be at peace after decades of unrest thanks to its hard-won cease-fires and a Catholic-Protestant government. But the lowering of a single Union Jack has exposed a society still split between two competing identities. Last month, Catholics who narrowly outnumber Protestants on the council voted to reduce the flying of the flag to just 18 official days a year, ending a century when the British national symbol favored by Protestants flew uninterrupted year-round. Catholics billed the move as a compromise, since they wanted the flag removed completely. On Wednesday, the flag fluttered for the first time since the vote to mark the 31st birthday of Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, but was taken down again at sunset.
Protestant hard-liners have responded with nightly illegal street blockades that often have degenerated into street battles between riot police and masked protesters armed with everything from sledgehammers to snooker balls. Police say 66 officers have been wounded, including six this week, and more than 100 rioters arrested. Nobody seems to know how, or when, the strife will end. While Northern Ireland suffers intercommunal conflict each summer because of traditional Protestant marches, this is the first time that Northern Ireland has suffered a month straight of angry civil disturbances in the winter. Some analysts, reflecting on how past Northern Ireland crises have unfolded, suspect that the extremists won't stop until someone is killed. "The quickest end looks like it would be in an atrocity. I fear that," said Duncan Morrow, a University of Ulster lecturer and former chief of Northern Ireland's Community Relations Council, a group that tries to bridge the persistent divide between Irish Catholics and British Protestants.
At the heart of the resumed conflict is the rapid change in Northern Ireland's population balance and political system. Northern Ireland was created as a Protestant-majority state in the U.K. shortly before the overwhelmingly Catholic rest of Ireland won independence in 1922. But the days of Protestant domination of politics and the police are distant memories. The latest census published last month shows Catholics in the majority in Belfast and gaining throughout Northern Ireland. The peace process has produced a new system in which a former Irish Republican Army commander now jointly leads the government, and a decade of preferential Catholic recruitment has produced a more Irish-oriented police force that Protestant militants increasingly view as the enemy.
Loyalists set up burning barricades on the Newtownards Road in Belfast, Monday, Jan. 7, 2013, a month after the City Council decided to fly the union flag on designated days only. Protesters have been out in force with sometimes violent results since a Dec. 3 decision by Belfast City Council to stop flying the British flag year-round. Such issues of symbolism frequently inflame sectarian passions in Northern Ireland, where Protestants mainly want to stay in the United Kingdom and Catholics want to unite with the Republic of Ireland.
For many Protestants, the change has overwhelmed the senses. Stripping "their" flag from City Hall has brought their central fear into focus - that they could become the minority in a land that eventually could fly the green, white and orange flag of the neighboring Republic of Ireland. "The vote on the flag was a touchstone. It transformed Protestant and unionist frustration into outright anger," said Mike Nesbitt, leader of the No. 2 Protestant-backed party, the Ulster Unionists. "Even if you put the flag back up 365 days a year - and I accept it's not going to happen - that would not fix the anger on the streets."
Many shop and restaurant owners in downtown Belfast are fuming, too - about scared-off customers, bills they can't pay and a political culture that wreaks economic havoc over matters of symbolism. They blame Catholic politicians for picking a needless fight right before Christmas, and blame Protestants for inflaming mobs with no ability to rein them back in. But Peter Robinson, the Protestant first minister of the government who still backs the protests so long as they remain peaceful, insists he's done all he can. "I can't bring them off the streets," he said.
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The unrest has also shown how symbolism remains a highly contentious issue in areas of Belfast where deprivation, unemployment and educational under-achievement have become entrenched. The City Council hung between Catholic Irish and Protestant British parties with the cross-community Alliance holding the balance of power voted on Dec. 3 to fly the British flag above the City Hall only on certain designated days. Until then, it had flown all-year round. Since the vote, loyalists have taken to the streets to protest. At a daily demonstration outside the Alliance office in east Belfast a local man said loyalist concerns were simply not registering with politicians.
He wore the British flag round his shoulders as well as on a hat and scarf and brandished a banner reading Defend our flag. Its a step too far, so it is, said the 59-year-old, who did not want to be identified. That flag was up for 106 years. Its Britain. It should be up. Its not on, they just take and take, he said of the Irish nationalists now sharing power in Northern Ireland with unionist parties. Its all right having peace and all, but not at any price. Dominic Bryan, director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Queens University Belfast, said the attachment to flags and emblems is heightened in ethnic disputes.
Unionist politicians had failed to prepare their electorate for the implications that power-sharing inevitably has for symbols such as the City Hall flag, he said. It seems madness to the outside world, but that is what people get deeply perturbed about, Bryan said. Belfast has a history of being a broadly Protestant and unionist town. The population shift is now about 50-50. The [flag] agreement marked a political change. However, society in Northern Ireland has seen dramatic changes as well, he said. Its de-industrialized. A lot of the jobs around the shipyard, which Protestants in east Belfast would have had have disappeared, Bryan said. The education system tends to fail working-class Protestants more than any other groups. There are some deep underlying issues in some of these areas that need to be addressed.
Alarmed by the reaction, unionist politicians of all shades have convened a forum to begin addressing the discontent felt at the perceived chipping away of Britishness. It held its first meeting on Thursday. Northern Irelands Regional Development Minister Danny Kennedy, a senior Ulster Unionist Party figure who was among the participants, said politicians needed to hear loyalist concerns first-hand. A section of the unionist Protestant population feel themselves isolated and alienated from the political process, he said. Theres a very strong sense within grassroots loyalism that they havent seen the benefits. Not all of the boats in the rising tide of the peace dividend have risen to the extent that others have seen, Kennedy said. They see that their Britishness ... is being undermined and diminished by political opponents such as Sinn Fein, he said.
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Dolours Price, 61, was a member of the Provisional IRA unit that launched the very first car-bomb attacks on London in 1973. She became one of Irish republicanism's most trenchant critics of Adams and his conversion to political compromise in the British territory of Northern Ireland. Police said her death Wednesday night at her home in Malahide, north of Dublin, was possibly the result of a drug overdose and foul play was not suspected. But it could have implications as far away as the U.S. Supreme Court.
In interviews Price repeatedly described Adams as her IRA commander in Catholic west Belfast in the early 1970s when the outlawed group was secretly abducting, executing and burying more than a dozen suspected informers in unmarked graves. Adams rejects the charges. Since 2011 Northern Ireland's police have been fighting a legal battle with Boston College to secure audiotaped interviews with Price detailing her IRA career to see if they contain evidence relating to unsolved crimes, particularly the 1972 kidnapping and murder of a Belfast widow, Jean McConville. Price allegedly admitted being the IRA member who drove McConville across the Irish border to an IRA execution squad.
Boston College commissioned the collection of such interviews with veterans of Northern Ireland's paramilitary warfare on condition their contents be kept secret until each interviewee's death. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the handover of the Price tapes pending resolution of a string of other connected lawsuits and legal challenges in lower U.S. courts. Her death could trigger a new wave of legal petitions on both sides. Boston College in a statement expressed regret at news of Price's death but said it couldn't speculate on its potential legal consequences.
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