In our document on Rosemary Nelson, we included an appendix that listed all known loyalist attacks from 1 January 1999 through 30 April 1999. Given the nature of the document the list focused on loyalist attacks. Since that time, we have continued to document attacks across the North, expanding our remit to include all attacks that might be considered sectarian (sometimes, however, the motives aren’t always clear.)
The following list of sectarian attacks is from 1 March 2000 through to March 31 2000. Should any incidents have inadvertently been left off the list please contact us. The issue of inclusion/exclusion is very problematic. For instance this document does not include punishment beatings 'within' a community, attacks by the security forces on civilians or by civilians on the security forces or murders where the perpetrators are believed to be from the same community and the motive is not thought to have been sectarian. We have also not included violent incidents connected to feuding within loyalism.
We will update this list each month.
1 March
Dungannon, County Tyrone, it emerged that the attack on four cars owned by Catholic priests, burned out on Wednesday Feb 23, is now thought to have been sectarian.
A Sinn Fein councillor has accused the RUC of deliberately and maliciously endangering his life over its handling of British Army files found in an Orange hall in October. Lower Falls representative Tom Hartley had just been told his details were among the 300 military documents discovered in the hands of loyalists at the Orange Order meeting hall at Stoneyford in County Antrim. The files, containing information gathered by British forces on republicans in the south Armagh and greater Belfast areas, had been in the possession of a dissident loyalist murder gang, according to sources.
2 March
The partner of the Antrim man who escaped with his life after a murder bid on 28 Feb as he cycled home from work, told the Irish News she was convinced it was a sectarian attack. The man had been run down in the Stiles Farm estate by a Vauxhall Astra after its occupants had shot at him with a shotgun. (See February attacks). The man is now said to be in a comfortable state in hospital.
3 March
A report in the Irish News said that the racist attack on two members of the Chinese community near the Ormeau Road in Belfast at the end of February was not the first. The attack, in which two young men were beaten and kicked by a gang of four men, was the latest in a series of race attacks on Chinese people in the North of Ireland, a spokesperson for the Chinese community said.
6 March
An inquest into the murder of Crumlin student Ciaran Heffernan was told that he was shot dead by the LVF, a dissident loyalist death squad, "because it was time [for them] to carry out an atrocity" according to the RUC officer leading the investigation. Ciaran, whose body was found in a bus depot in Portadown on 25 April 1998, had been shot six times in the head. He had been selected at random.
11 March
Belfast’s Bombay Street residents were reported in the Andersonstown News as being dismayed at the Northern Ireland Office’s (NIO) reluctance to fund further protection for their houses from sectarian attack.
The same paper reported that the British Secretary of State has told the Garvaghy Residents’ spokesman Breandan McCionnaith that disciplinary measures are to be taken against the RIR soldiers who were photographed with an official Drumcree Orange banner.
18 March
A 20-year-old woman and her 10 month-old daughter have been injured in a loyalist arson attack which could easily have killed them both. At 1 am Ms Francesca Feeney, a Catholic, and her daughter Rebecca were asleep in a bedroom in their house in Carnalbanagh six miles outside Glenarm in the Glens of Antrim, when a petrol bomb was hurled into the room. It ignited immediately. The blaze was quickly put out by her partner Ronnie Hamilton, a Protestant. The couple believe they are being targeted because of their mixed religions. This is the third time they have been targeted.
19 March
The Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland released a statement denying any connection between the murder of the three young Quinn brothers in Ballymoney, on 12 July 1998, and the contemporaneous confrontation between Orangemen and the security forces at Drumcree. The Quinn home, a ‘mixed’ home on a loyalist estate, was attacked by a UVF gang with petrol bombs at the height of the Drumcree crisis. The Order called for the inquest to be held "speedily" .
20 March
A 15 year-old Protestant boy from Faughan Valley school was attacked by a gang of nationalists who called him a "jaffa bastard" while he waited for a bus on Derry’s City Side. The boy, who was wearing his school uniform, had been to a doctor’s appointment and was waiting for a bus home with his friend when a gang set upon them and beat him in the face and head. He sustained a broken nose, but doctors at Altnagelvin Hospital had to wait a week before operating because of the severity of the swelling to his face. The DUP’s William Hay said the attack sent out all the wrong signals to young Protestants about using the city centre.
22 March
After having narrowly survived the sectarian firebombing of their home last November, the Miller family, Catholics from the mostly Protestant Bann Drive, on Derry’s Waterside, have moved back into their home. When they did so, their neighbours turned out in the streets to wish them a welcome home. Praising the level of support her Protestant neighbours gave her and her mother throughout the ordeal, Hilary Miller said "Our neighbours are terribly good, fit to talk to you when they meet you and come in and out of the house". A few days later the fire crew who had been on duty the night of the fire stopped by to leave a bunch of flowers.
Two men are currently awaiting trial in connection with the attack.
24 March
A 14 year old Catholic youth was physically and verbally attacked in Ballynafeigh on the Upper Ormeau road, as he waited at a bus stop. This is the latest in a series of sectarian attacks on nationalists in the area in recent months. Local councillors have called on community leaders in the area to help end the attacks.
26 March
St James’ Catholic Church Aldergrove, burned to the ground two years ago during an LVF firebombing campaign, was reopened , having been rebuilt for the second time in its 220 year-old history.
31 March
A UDA hit list found in Springmartin, West Belfast, contains details on Sinn Fein assembyman Gerry Kelly MLA, and the brother of Upper Falls Sinn Fein MLA Alex Maskey, Liam Maskey. Ulster Democratic Party councillors who knew of the list’s existence were criticised for being slow to warn the people named in it. It is believed that the UDA have been actively targeting republicans in the area.
An NUS/USI (National Union of Students/ Union of Students in Ireland) survey has found that only eight percent of colleges in the North have developed policies for dealing with sectarian prejudice. Another survey suggests that 50 percent of first year students never socialise across the sectarian divide, while 10 percent of students in said they would not share accommodation with someone from the ‘other side’.