BELFAST, Sept. 13 -- For three nights Protestant rioters trashed David Hamilton's neighborhood in east Belfast, tossing firebombs and rocks, hijacking and burning cars and ripping down streetlights in the city's worst violence in years.
Looking at the shattered battlefield of his street on Tuesday, Hamilton, 37, also a Protestant, said he would have been out there too if he were a little younger and didn't have four children. "The Protestant people are persecuted and want to stick up for themselves, but nobody seems to be listening," he said. "The only way to be heard is the way the Catholics do it -- with violence."
According to a variety of Protestants interviewed here, the riots over the past few days were an expression of rage and frustration among members of the Protestant working class, who feel they are being left behind economically and politically in the aftermath of the three-decade sectarian war known as "the Troubles."
When the Irish Republican Army this summer declared an end to its armed struggle, British Prime Minister Tony Blair hailed the historic step. His government immediately began withdrawing troops and dismantling military posts in the province.
But furious Protestants said they were being betrayed. Their rage was compounded by the release of a convicted IRA bomber, Sean Kelly, the night before the IRA declaration in July. Protestants saw it as a reward from Blair for disarmament.
Protestants interviewed here said the peace process and the landmark 1998 Good Friday power-sharing accords have disproportionately benefited Catholics.
Since the accords, fading political violence and a strong British economy have brought improvements to once-gray Belfast, reflected in a beautifully redeveloped waterfront and construction cranes towering over new downtown offices and shops. But Protestant leaders say unemployment is still 70 percent in some Protestant areas, housing conditions have not improved and educational achievement among the poor remains abysmal. They contend poor Catholics have fared better -- a result, they say, of the government's one-sided largess to secure the end of IRA violence.
"They threatened the government, they blew up Parliament, they blew up bombs in London," said Florence Rae, 51, carrying groceries past the burned-out remains of two cars near her house on Albert Bridge Road. "It's not the Protestant people who are blowing up England. But Tony Blair doesn't want to know about the Protestant people, and he is giving the IRA everything it wants."
Those claims are denied by British officials, as well as by Northern Irish Catholic leaders who say discrimination and unemployment are still serious problems in their communities. Analysts in Belfast say that conditions are as bad or worse in Catholic areas, and that Protestant complaints of mistreatment by the government are unfounded.
"Quite clearly there are issues, but the problem comes when you say, 'It's because I'm a Protestant,' " said Peter Shirlow, a senior lecturer at the University of Ulster, a Protestant who said he grew up in a working-class neighborhood. He said many Protestant job losses were the result of heavy industry moving out of Belfast -- global economics rather than government discrimination. Poor educational achievement among Protestants, he said, often stemmed from a belief in working-class areas that higher education was not important because "real men work in hard jobs."
"I've been a lecturer here for 14 years, and in that time I've had one student from the Shankill Road," Shirlow said, referring to the major Protestant thoroughfare in west Belfast, where rioting has taken place this week. At least 60 police officers and 10 civilians were injured.
The struggle in Northern Ireland has divided the largely Catholic republican movement, which wants the province united with the Republic of Ireland and is symbolized by the IRA, against Protestant loyalists, who want it to remain part of Britain. While world attention usually focuses on the IRA, the province also has two main loyalist militias: the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defense Association (UDA). Both remain a powerful presence on the streets; in the past two months, four men have been killed in violence among loyalist paramilitary groups.
