Holy Cross pipe bomb raises fear that loyalists may revive dispute

One of Belfast's most bitter territorial controversies flared back into violent life yesterday when loyalists placed a pipe bomb at a Catholic girls' primary school in the north of the city.

The bomb, which was discovered at about 8am on the first day of the new school term, was made safe by Army experts and there were no injuries. It had been left at a school gate. The children were able to enter the premises by another route.

The school, Holy Cross, was the setting for months of sectarian clashes in 2001 when loyalists attempted to prevent Catholic schoolgirls and their parents from reaching the premises, which is in a Protestant district.

Responsibility for the device was claimed by the Red Hand Defenders, a cover-name often used by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), the largest loyalist paramilitary group. The attack, which was widely condemned, generated fears that the group is intent on reviving a dispute that received considerable publicity around the world.

The UDA has for several months been locked in internal feuding, which has claimed several lives. There have been attacks on Catholic targets but most of its energies have gone into factional violence.

The loyalist figure Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair has been in the thick of the fighting as most of the rest of the organisation has sought to get rid of him. Last week one of his supporters was shot dead at a bar in south Belfast.

The Holy Cross dispute had calmed down in recent months but was never formally or finally settled, with tensions never far from the surface. Loyalists have remained unhappy about Catholic pupils going into their district, but had accepted that their protest was counter-productive and harmful to their cause. There has been little recent evidence of a fresh groundswell of militancy among local Protestants, but the UDA has shown it has the capacity to whip up ill-feeling. What is not clear is whether the pipe bomb attack is an isolated incident or the start of a series of loyalist protests.

Father Aidan Troy, a school governor, said: "This is a frightening development. The parents were getting more and more confident that this terrible chapter in our history was behind us, but this is horrific."

The local loyalist MP Nigel Dodds condemned the attack, saying: "It is totally despicable. What on earth any organisation hopes to gain by this sort of action is beyond all right-thinking people."

Alban Maginness of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party described the attack as completely cowardly.

Gerry Kelly, a Sinn Fein assembly member, said: "The new year has only begun and already we have a disgraceful attack on children by some faction of the UDA."