Loyalism in Development

autumn of 1922, political violence in Belfast cost 465 people their lives, with over 1,000 wounded. This conflict started with two bouts of rioting in 1920. The first came in July when after the killing of a northern police officer in Cork, in the little slum streets of west and central Belfast, volleys of shots and stones were exchanged, 22 people were killed and hundreds wounded. Just over a month later on August 22, when another northern detective was assassinated by the IRA in Lisburn, there followed another ten days of sectarian violence in Belfast, with another 33 deaths. The rioting of this period resembled low-intensity warfare more than civil disturbances at times. ‘Belfast’s Bloody Sunday’ of July 10, 1921 for instance – in which 16 people were killed, 70 injured and 200 homes destroyed, saw the use on both sides (now organised into paramilitary groups) of rifles, machine guns and hand grenades as well as the customary stones and clubs. From this period also grew a great distrust between the Catholic population of Belfast and the new Northern Ireland security forces – the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Ulster Special Constabulary – who unlike their predecessors in the RIC were almost wholly Protestant. With the defeat of the IRA in the North by late 1922, violence, including rioting, eventually petered out. However, disturbances would again erupt from time to time in Belfast in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of these incidents –such as the 1932 Outdoor Relief riots actually saw Catholics and Protestants demonstrate (and fight) side by side in protest at the cutting of unemployment assistance. Depressingly often, however, violence would resume the old sectarian pattern. In 1935, after several months of rising tension, riots broke out during the Orange parades on 12th July. The majority of the 11 people killed in the 1935 riots were Protestants, but most of those forced from their homes (86%) and injured were Catholic.

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