POLICE FIRED plastic baton rounds during serious street violence in Co Armagh at the weekend as rioting broke out in the nationalist Drumbeg and Meadowbrook estates in Craigavon.
Three new-style plastic baton rounds were fired when rioters attacked police vehicles with bars and pieces of masonry on Saturday night.
Chief Insp Jason Murphy said: “This was an attempt to kill or seriously injure our officers.” He claimed his officers had done everything possible to quell the situation before they resorted to firing rounds. “From time to time we face trying circumstances. It is very clear that [Saturday’s] events were locally orchestrated and were an attempt to lure my officers into a secondary attack,” he said.
Sinn Féin said it was “completely opposed to the use of plastic bullets”. The trouble followed an attack on Brownlow police station in the area. A device was launched at the station, but missed. Police have warned the public to look out for anything suspicious in the locality of the base.
It is believed the trouble was organised and co-ordinated by a dissident republican faction and follows last week’s murder by the Real IRA of a Derry man and attacks in Keady, Co Armagh and Newry, Co Down last week.
Sinn Féin Assembly member John O’Dowd condemned the violence. “I would challenge those who claim to speak politically for these factions to tell the republican and nationalist community exactly how these sorts of activities, or indeed the recent murder in Derry, advance the cause of a united Ireland one iota,” he said.
“The fact is they don’t. A peaceful and democratic path to Irish unity exists and it is the path that the vast majority of republicans are now on.”
Upper Bann DUP MP David Simpson said there had been “an escalation of dissident republican violence” in the past week, which was “another attempt by these individuals to drag us all back to a violent past that everyone wants to leave behind”.
SDLP Assembly member Dolores Kelly said: “Republican dissidents seem to be upping their game and becoming more emboldened by recent events.”
Éirígí, a political grouping opposed to Stormont and to the new policing dispensation, said the Craigavon violence illustrated the unacceptability of the PSNI in nationalist areas.
Breandán Mac Cionnaith of Éirígí said: “It is time for the PSNI’s political cheerleaders to come clean on their claims that the devolution of limited policing and justice powers will change the nationalist experience of policing.
“At a time when the great and the good are proclaiming a new beginning for policing in the Six Counties, the PSNI is proving, by its own actions, that it is business as usual as far as its treatment of nationalist communities is concerned.”
But Mr O’Dowd said the trouble was wrong and politically pointless. “The sad reality is that these people who claim to be republican now share exactly the same political objectives as the rejectionist unionists,” he said.
“The people who carried out this attack want to see an end to the political process, they want to see an end to a process which as we speak is moving more and more powers away from Westminster and into Irish politicians’ hands, they want to see the British army on Irish streets and they want control over our daily lives in the hands of British Direct Rule Ministers. That is an outcome which we are determined will not be delivered.”
In west Belfast, a 15-year-old boy was charged with riotous behaviour after police came under attack from a mob hurling petrol bombs. He will appear at Lisburn Youth Court on March 18th.