Local people vent anger on TV firm

"UTV?" shouted the irate Protestant

"UTV?" shouted the irate Protestant. "UTV? At least the BBC made us look like humans and not what Ronnie Flanagan said we were, scum."

It was all about communication yesterday as the world's media, starved of a good story elsewhere, descended on north Belfast.

Protestant residents, fresh from being beaten back from their doors by the RUC, clearly felt they were losing the media battle.

"We were beat by the peelers and kicked and punched and you never showed that, you never showed (Shankill bomber) Sean Kelly standing down there," the reporter from UTV was told as he asked if anyone would speak to him.

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His persistence was rewarded but not before he was told, "you're going to do the same, we don't want to know you".

As they gathered before being escorted to their school, some children and parents were surrounded by reporters. One girl had to fight her way through the legs of reporters interviewing her mother and more photogenic younger sister after she was separated from them.

While the "welcome to loyalist Ardoyne" message painted on the road might have been easy for nationalist parents to ignore, loyalist chants such as "who, who, who, who let the Taigs out?" were harder to avoid, as was the boom of a detonating pipe bomb.

The same tears were spilt as the day before but this time the girls' fears were not as well founded.

Two rows of Land Rovers formed an avenue to the gates of the school and the families moved through an inner cordon of RUC officers bearing riot shields, shouting instructions as they went.

At one point, the sheer mass of photographers and cameramen walking in front brought the procession to an unseemly halt but it eventually reached the school gates.

Here the mikes, cameras and notebooks were again pressed up to the faces of the four-year-olds and their mothers.