Police and army patrols guarded a Belfast primary school Thursday after weeks of bubbling tensions between Protestants and Roman Catholics erupted into the worst rioting in Northern Ireland for years.
Police officers had to step in for the third consecutive day to keep the rival factions apart in the north of the city.
Overnight they had been subjected to a hail of gunfire and petrol bombs as they tried to separate mobs using a row over access to a Catholic school as an excuse to riot.
The violence broke out amid a background of frantic attempts in Belfast and London to break deadlocks threatening the province's power-sharing goverment.
Northern Ireland's leader, Protestant Ulster Unionist chief David Trimble, has pledged to resign on July 1 if the IRA has not begun to disarm by then.
Security minister Jane Kennedy condemned the rioting as "sickening".
"This is mob violence at its most primitive," she added. "It has nothing to do with grievances, real or imagined."
The overnight violence was not related to the talks but is another sign of the province's bitter religious and political divides -- BELFAST (AFP)
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