The following list of sectarian and other hate-driven incidents and attacks is from 1 through 31 March 2003. The criteria we use for inclusion is based on the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) criteria; if a person/organisation feels that the motivation for an attack against them was sectarian (or racist or homophobic), then it should be counted as such. We rely on a number of sources for our information, but this is by no means comprehensive. If you find incidents that have been left off the list please contact us.
March 1, Saturday. The North Belfast News reported that the new head of the south east Antrim UDA was connected to the January 2002 murder of Daniel McColgan, the July 2000 murder of Gavin Brett and a number of murders carried out during the loyalist feud of 2000. (NBN)
March 2, Sunday. It was reported that the UDA in north Belfast had distanced itself from members of the neo-nazi British Ulster Alliance who had visited loyalist parts of north Belfast. In March 2002 the Tiger's Bay UDA broke a locally agreed cessation of rioting in order to show their Combat 18 comrades how to initiate ethnic violence. (NBN, PFC)
The UDA was blamed for attacks on Catholic homes in Dromora Street, near the Ormeau Road in south Belfast. (IN, SBN, CW)
In Derry, a concrete block was thrown through the living room window of the home of the Church of Ireland (Episcopalian) Dean of St Columb's Cathedral. The Dean, his wife, and their two sons were unhurt in the attack. Initial reports that the attack was sectarian were dismissed by the PSNI who said that it was an 'opportunistic' attack. (DJ, CW, IN)
March 4, Tuesday. The Andersonstown News reported that a Post office employee at the Mallusk sorting office in Belfast had been suspended after a Catholic colleague had received a loyalist death threat, including a live bullet, by post. This followed a number of incidents involving death threats against Catholic employees in the wake of the murder of Catholic postman Daniel McColgan in January 2001. In February 2003, a Catholic postman received death threats from loyalist paramilitaries, hours after a Protestant employee was suspended for making derisory comments about Daniel McColgan. Workers ensured that the suspension remained in place by threatening to strike if the offender was reinstated. (AN, NBN, CW)
A bomb detonator found at Maghaberry jail was linked to a campaign by loyalist and dissident republican prisoners to be kept in segregated wings. (UTV, BBC, PSNI)
March 5, Wednesday. A man from Monkstown, Co Antrim, was fined £250 by a Derry magistrate for taunting nationalists and giving a nazi salute during the August 2002 Apprentice Boys parade in Derry. (DJ, IN, CW)
A machine gun was found in an alleyway in Derlett Street, close to the Ormeau Road in south Belfast. It was believed to have belonged to the UDA. (IN, CW)
The Irish News reported a University of Ulster survey, which found that Protestant backing for mixed religion areas had fallen from 81 per cent to 59 per cent between 1996 and 2001, while Catholic support had fallen from 85 per cent to 72 per cent in the same period. Similar trends were charted in attitudes towards mixed workplaces (IN, DJ)
March 6, Thursday. William Hill, 20, appeared in Belfast High Court accused of murdering 25-year-old David Cupples, who died on Christmas Day. Mr Cupples, a Protestant, was mistaken for a Catholic. Hill was said to have told his friends that he had "got a taig" after he had attacked the man with a brick. (IN, BT, BBC)
Darren Watson, 28, was given a two year conditional discharge by Judge Patrick Markey for possessing a firearm, after an incident in which police had rammed his car off the road after a high speed chase. He was fined £50 for dangerous driving and £10 for having no insurance. Watson, who was on remission from a five year sentence for his part in a loyalist paramilitary punishment beating, had been arrested and quizzed by RUC officers investigating the 1997 beating to death of 16-year-old Catholic schoolboy James Morgan, whose body was found under rotting animal carcasses. Because he was not given a custodial sentence, Watson will not be required to serve the rest of his five-year sentence. (IN, ST)
March 7, Friday. Belfast Crown Court jailed 28-year-old soldier Darren Mark Bishop for three years for holding a pistol for murdered LVF man Stephen Warnock. (IN PFC, UTV)
Residents of Castleblayney, Co Monaghan, commemorated the murder of middle-aged farmer Patrick Mone, the sole fatality of a no-warning loyalist car bomb left outside a packed pub on March 7, 1976. (IN, PFC)
37-year-old Philip Joseph Blaney of Shimna Walk in Lurgan was jailed for 12 years for the manslaughter of Elizabeth O'Neill, who died in a loyalist pipe bomb attack on her Portadown home in 1999. (IN, CW, UTV)
A young girl found a pipe bomb in the driveway of her home in Ballymena, Co. Antrim. Police "have not ruled out a sectarian motive" for the attack. (UTV, PSNI)
March 8, Saturday. The South Belfast News reported that teenagers from different religious backgrounds in the Ormeau Road area were using mobile phones to organise sectarian riots with each other. (SBN)
A young woman was injured during clashes between Celtic and Rangers fans in Derry. (DN, UTV)
March 9, Sunday. It is thought that arson attacks on two Catholic secondary schools, De la Salle in Downpatrick, Co Down and The Good Shepherd in Poleglass, Belfast, were sectarian. Sources blamed the Ulster Young Militants (UYM), the UDA's youth wing. (UTV, PSNI, CW)
March 10, Monday. A 19-year-old youth from the mainly Catholic Currynerin estate outside Derry was punched, stabbed and subjected to sectarian abuse close to the mainly loyalist Tullyally estate. The youth managed to run away from his attacker. (DN, LS, CW)
Richard McAuley, press secretary for Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, received a card containing a death threat. The card was written in "fire and brimstone" biblical language, a trademark of the LVF. (AN)
The UDA are thought to have been responsible for an arson attack on the home of a 22-year-old Catholic woman in the Ballysally estate in Coleraine. (IN, BBC)
March 12, Wednesday. A 15-year-old youth was charged in connection with a sectarian attack on a school bus in the Limestone Road area of north Belfast in February. Two Protestant schoolgirls had been injured in the attack. (UTV, BT)
March 13, Thursday. The Irish News revealed that a former RIR soldier and an RUC informer, both currently in prison for loyalist offences, were among a list of suspects in the 1999 murder of solicitor Rosemary Nelson. There have long been accusations of security force collusion in this case. (IN, BBC, UTV, see also www.serve.com/pfc for more info)
March 14. Friday. An investigation by the Police Ombudsman's office into police misconduct found 55 cases where solicitors or barristers had suffered sectarian or racist abuse, physical threats, defamatory comments or threats to have their details passed on to loyalist paramilitaries. The report is available online at www.policeombudsman.org (IN, UTV, BBC)
March 16, Sunday. In Belfast there were sectarian clashes at various interface areas following Rangers victory over Celtic in the Scottish premier league. Disturbances were reported on the Limestone Road as well as in Whitewell in north Belfast where a member of an ambulance crew was injured. Two police officers were also injured. Alex Maskey, the Sinn Fein Lord Mayor of Belfast, told the rioters to "wise up". There were also clashes in Lurgan, Co. Armagh, where a woman suffered a mouth injury. (IN, NBN, AN)
Loyalists pipe bombed pensioners houses in Strand Walk, in the mainly Catholic Short Strand enclave in east Belfast. (IN, SBN, CW)
Scottish police seized an undisclosed quantity of arms and ammunition from suspected loyalists attempting to use the cover of Rangers fans returning to Ireland after the Celtic-Rangers match in Glasgow to smuggle the weapons. Details of the quantity seized or of people arrested were not available. It is understood that the haul belonged to the UVF. (IN, NBN, AN)
March 17, Monday. A Catholic worker told a fair employment tribunal he was "terrified" by displays of loyalist paraphernalia and sectarian taunts while working at a fish merchants in the Co Down village of Portavogie. (UTV, BBC, IN)
March 18, Tuesday. A family fled their home in Glengormley, north of Belfast, after a loyalist arson attack. (UTV, PSNI)
March 19, Wednesday. Loyalists threw a pipe bomb across the peace line into the mainly Catholic Short Strand enclave in east Belfast. (UTV, CW, SBN)
March 20, Thursday. Clifford McKeown, a loyalist already serving 12 years for possessing guns, was found guilty of the 1996 murder of Catholic taxi driver Michael McGoldrick. In a confession originally made to a journalist, McKeown said that he had killed the 31-year-old father of two during the height of the Drumcree crisis as a "birthday present" for LVF warlord Billy Wright. (IN, BT, NL, BBC)
Data from the 2001 Northern Ireland census revealed that Catholic men are still almost twice as likely as Protestants to be unemployed. (BBC, IN)
Loyalists are thought to have been behind a petrol bomb attack on the home of a Catholic man, his wife and two children in the mainly Protestant Millbrook area in Larne. (IN, CW)
There were sectarian clashes between nationalist and loyalist youths in the Ballygomartin Road area in west Belfast. Loyalist leaders complained that the PSNI's handling of the rioting was biased and heavy handed towards loyalists. Two protestant youths were arrested. (IN, BBC, UTV)
The UVF were accused of orchestrating the latest upsurge in attacks on the mainly Catholic Short Strand enclave in east Belfast. A week's onslaught culminated in four pipe bombings and an attack during which a digger demolished a CCTV camera covering the interface area around St Matthews Church. Short Strand residents complained that no one had been apprehended for the attacks, which took place in full view of the security forces. (IN, SBN, CW, PSNI)
March 24, Monday. The Irish News reported that the office of the Police Ombudsman had been denied the funds to investigate three controversial killings. The first was the case of 16-year-old Portadown girl Alice McLoughlin, killed by a shot fired from the weapon of an RUC officer in whose car she was travelling. The officer is still serving. The second is the 1997 murder of Protestant Raymond McCord, thought by his family to have been ordered by a UVF leader who was also a police informer. The third is the case of Sgt Joe Campbell, a Catholic RUC officer murdered outside Cushendall police station in 1977 amid allegations of collusion between RUC officers and loyalist paramilitaries. A Special Branch officer was one of those originally charged with the murder of Sgt Campbell. (IN, BBC, PFC)
March 27, Thursday. The family of Eddie Fullerton, the Sinn Fein councillor from Buncrana, Co Donegal, murdered by the UDA/UFF in 1991, have called for a proper investigation into all the circumstances surrounding his death. Eddie Fullerton was murdered using the same weapon that had been used in the killing of four Catholic labourers in Castlerock. The weapon was part of a haul imported from South Africa with the assistance of British military agents. There are also allegations that businessmen with vested interests in Donegal colluded with loyalist paramilitaries to have the popular councillor removed. (DN, PFC, CW)
March 28, Friday. The Irish News revealed that senior Ulster Unionist Lord Laird of Artigarvan had been giving PR advice to the paramilitary Loyalist Commission at the height of the UDA's recent murder campaign against the Catholic community. (IN, BBC, UTV)
March 29, Saturday. A four strong gang of loyalists attacked a Catholic man with a hammer, and then tried to drag him into a car in Duncairn Gardens in north Belfast. The 20-year-old man managed to escape, even though his attackers chased him in their car, and was later treated in hospital for head injuries. The man's father compared his son's attackers to the Shankill Butchers, a UVF gang responsible for a series of the most brutal sectarian murders in the history of the troubles. (NBN)
The Irish News reported that a US based website mocking the death of north Belfast Protestant teenager Thomas McDonald had been shut down. 16-year-old Thomas McDonald was knocked off his bicycle and killed on 4 September 2001 during sectarian rioting at the Longlands/White City interface at the height of the Holy Cross crisis. 33-year-old mother of three Alison McKeown was found guilty in February of manslaughter by reason of provocation. She had driven her car up onto the pavement after Thomas had thrown stones at it. She was given a two-year jail sentence. (IN, UTV, BBC)
Self-styled white supremacists, the White Nationalist Party, pinned a note to the door of a Ballymena family, which read, "This is a white area, not for blacks." The incident follows racist attacks on members of the Filipino and Chinese community in the town. The White Nationalist Party also distributed leaflets in Craigavon, Co Armagh opposing the construction of a Mosque near Bleary after Ulster Unionist and Democratic Unionist councillors had opposed the plans in January this year. In Ballymena in February 2002, a number of DUP councillors voted to reject a good will gift from the town's Moslem community to the council. One of them, Mr Alexander that he did not "believe in the Islamic faith" and was "suspicious because of the attacks on New York and Washington… A lot of people in the United States and elsewhere have been slaughtered by them." He added, "There is only one Lord, one faith and one baptism by the holy spirit as written in the holy scriptures". However, the DUP mayor of Ballymena Hubert Nicholl, referring to the racist activity, said, "We don't want or need this sort of thing happening in Ballymena which is a friendly and welcoming town." (IN, BBC, CW, PFC)
March 30, Sunday. Nationalists are believed to have been behind the arson attack on Causanagh Orange Hall in Loughgall, Co Armagh. (IN, BBC)
Two Protestant men were seriously injured when they were assaulted in Ballymena by a group of four men who asked them if they were "Fenians" [Catholics]. When the men replied "no" the four men, who were armed with a baseball bat and a golf club, attacked them. (IN)
Sources:
AN: Andersonstown News
BT: Belfast Telegraph
BBC: BBC radio and television news, BBC online, Radio Foyle
CW: Local community workers
DJ: Derry Journal
DN: Derry News
IN: Irish News
IT: Irish Times
ITN: Independent Television News
LI: London Independent
LS: Londonderry Sentinel
NBN: North Belfast News
NL: Newsletter
OB: Observer
PFC: Pat Finucane Centre
RM: RM Distribution
RUC/PSNI: Police Service of Northern Ireland (RUC) press office.
SBP: Sunday Business Post
SBN: South Belfast News
ST: Sunday Tribune
UTV: Ulster Television