Violence worsens in Belfast as Trimble urges Blair to act

The troubles in east Belfast deepened yesterday with further bitter clashes between Protestants and Catholics on the edges of the nationalist Short Strand district.

The former US president Bill Clinton, who was visiting Northern Ireland, urged everyone to view the disturbances in context, saying: "It is the last gasp of an old order, and old habits die hard."

There were fears of more turmoil after loyalist gangs hijacked buses and other vehicles in the Newtownards Road district, the scene of rioting and disturbances for several nights.

Catholics complained yesterday that loyalists had disrupted a local funeral service, while Protestants said a teenage girl had been attacked.

Contacts continued between republican and loyalist political representatives but there were also ill-tempered public exchanges that did little to ease tensions. The Ulster Unionist leader and First Minister, David Trimble, flew to London for a meeting with Tony Blair at Downing Street.

Mr Trimble alleged that the IRA had been involved in the disturbances and called on Tony Blair to signal clearly "that those organisations organising this violence will suffer consequences from it". Making a statement to Sinn Fein, he added: "I don't want any excuses, I don't want any lies. The truth of the matter is that what we have seen in east Belfast in recent weeks is simple, naked aggression."

After the meeting, Mr Trimble said: "Government has to, in the short term, take action to restore confidence and restore respect for the law on the streets of Belfast."

Mr Trimble's expression of Protestant feelings is the mirror-image of perceptions on the republican and nationalist side, where Short Strand is viewed as a beleaguered community under pressure from aggressive loyalists.

Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein's president, said: "I'm not going to lecture him the way he sometimes thinks it's necessary to lecture me. He needs just to be mindful that all of us need to be careful about what we say and how we can use our good offices to try to sort this situation."

Mr Adams met David Ervine, leader of a loyalist party with paramilitary links, yesterday. Mr Ervine said Mr Adams had assured him he wanted the violence to end. He added: "It is in everybody's interests to stop the awfulness before it spreads and degenerates. If anybody thinks this doesn't have the capacity to derail our hopes for the future, then they are living in Cloud-cuckoo-land."

In east Belfast, the Paisleyite politician Sammy Wilson claimed a teenage Protestant girl had been beaten and spat at by a mob near a Catholic church. Mr Wilson, a member of the Northern Ireland Policing Board, added: "The police – who again appear to have no authority to go into Short Strand – have made no attempt to arrest the perpetrators or to remove the republican mob from the chapel grounds."

Joe O'Donnell, a Sinn Fein councillor, alleged that nationalists were attacked on their way to a doctor's surgery and post office in Newtownards Road, and mourners at a funeral were pelted with bricks. He said: "If society has sunk this low, I really despair. This is the lowest of the low. It is sick."

Mr Clinton was in Northern Ireland to open an international peace centre in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, which bears his name. The centre was built on the site of the Poppy Day bombing, which killed 11 people at the town's cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, 1987.