Sectarian tensions and loyalist feuding had traumatising impacts on schoolchildren in the early 2000s, declassified State papers have shown.
During that period young Catholic children attending Holy Cross primary school in north Belfast were subjected to attacks and harassment while Protestant children attending schools in the Shankill area of Belfast were caught up in internal loyalist paramilitary feuding.
Stormont and British direct rule ministers attempted to develop strategies to assist the children and lessen the tensions while acknowledging that children were ensnared by the hold loyalist paramilitaries had on certain communities.
A meeting of the Northern Executive on September 13th, 2001, was given an update on the Holy Cross dispute, which was then at its height with schoolgirls and their parents protected by police and British soldiers having to run gauntlets of loyalist intimidation and abuse to get to their school.
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Loyalists mounted pickets while claiming they were being subjected to intimidation by local nationalists. Some of the protesters hurled stones, bricks and fireworks, blast bombs and urine-filled balloons at the children and the police protecting them.
The loyalist paramilitary group the Red Hand Defenders also issued death threats against parents and school staff.
The story of the attacks and abuse made world headlines as the dispute ran on into late November of that year.
Executive ministers at their September meeting appeared unsure of how to solve the dispute. They agreed to establish a local office to liaise between the Executive and local politicians.
It was also agreed to create a “formal mechanism for dialogue” with local communities to “address the full range of social, economic and community issues” affecting the areas.
In addition, through early 2003 and into the summer of that year there was a bitter dispute centred around the Shankill area involving rival factions of the Ulster Defence Association, which resulted in five killings.
The dispute was between the general UDA organisation and its so-called C Company in the Lower Shankill led by Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair, with Adair and his family and several of his associates forced to flee the Shankill that year.
Direct rule ministers learned from briefings with principals at Malvern Street and Edenbrook primary schools in the Shankill area how in some cases young children were forced to take sides depending on the affiliations of their parents to the two disputing paramilitary groups.
Northern Ireland Office security minister Jane Kennedy heard how one class at Malvern Street school was split into two to ease tensions, and how this move had “dramatically improved” the situation.
When she visited the two schools on June 13th, 2003, tensions were particularly high as it was just two weeks after the main UDA organisation allegedly murdered 21-year Alan McCullough from the lower Shankill. He was associated with the Adair UDA group and earlier that year had fled Belfast. He had returned based on assurances he would not be harmed.
Kennedy in her visit to the two schools was told that the “general feeling was that more trouble was brewing”.
She learned that the paramilitary influence in the area “was still as bad as ever”. “The murder of Alan McCullough had raised tensions in the area,” she was informed. “The children were very aware of what was going on and still threatened their fellow classmates whose families might be on the other side of the feud.
“There was also the fear that some of the children would be recruited; at age 10 they were allowed to become involved.”
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