From “Grace Over Guns: Pursuing Peace in a Militarized World” by Ben Daniel
In August 1969, as unrest was on the rise, a group of pro-Catholic civil rights activists staged a march down the Falls Road. When they got to Divis Tower, Protestant militants attacked the marchers. The ensuing melee became what Catholics in Belfast call a pogrom, a rampage that, over the course of two days, destroyed 179 homes, displaced 1,800 families, and killed seven people. Most of those harmed in the violence were Roman Catholic, including Patrick Rooney, as resident of Divis Tower, who died when a stray bullet from a paramilitary police gun struck him in the living room of his family’s apartment. Patrick was nine years old. When violence erupted, paramilitary police intervened on behalf of the Protestant mob. The next day, the British military occupied Belfast, and the ensuing war between the United Kingdom’s military and various Irish Republican groups would last nearly thirty years.
That’s how one side tells the story.
The other side – the Protestant side – says Roman Catholic residents of Northern Ireland had long used violence in an attempt to force a restoration of Ireland as a single country, which had been fractured since 1921 when most of the island gained independence from Britain. To many Protestants in Belfast, the Catholic Republicans were terrorists resorting to violence because they had neither the votes nor the political wherewithal necessary to restore Irish unity democratically. Irish Protestants are proud of their history and culture; they fear both will be erased if Ireland becomes a politically united island with a Roman Catholic majority. It is also true that during the Troubles, Irish Protestants often were victims of Catholic terrorism, some of it horrifically violent. To this day there is an extreme lack of trust and goodwill between Roman Catholics and Protestants in Belfast and across Northern Ireland.