Grandmother, 105, forced from home by sectarian attack

Jane Crudden, who is 105 years old, had to be evacuated by ambulance after she was showered with glass when loyalists staged a sectarian attack on her north Belfast home, pelting it with bricks.

Mrs Crudden, who is bed-ridden, was lying in a downstairs room when four bricks came through the window. Badly shaken, she was carried into an ambulance to be taken to a residential home to recover.

Her family said that the terrible ordeal had left her very scared. A Catholic who lives close to the Ardoyne area where she was born, Mrs Crudden has 11 children and more than 120 descendants.

There was widespread political condemnation of the attack, which is being blamed on the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association, as are a series of other attacks on Wednesday. Four homes were attacked with bricks and paint-bombs; three others were petrol-bombed.

The SDLP Lord Mayor of Belfast, Martin Morgan, said the attack was despicable and disgraceful. "My message to the thugs responsible for it is clear: there is no place for sectarianism in the new Belfast."

Cliftondene Gardens, where Mrs Crudden lives, is a comfortable residential street in the north of Belfast, with attractive homes with gardens. But quite a few houses here and in surrounding streets have been boarded up and a number are for sale

The area's misfortune is that it has become one of north's Belfast disputed areas. The streets border on Glenbryn, a tough loyalist housing estate that several years ago saw its residents involved in the Holy Cross school dispute. Protestant numbers have been dwindling in many areas of north Belfast, leaving a series of tough redoubts in which loyalists regard themselves as being increasingly surrounded by Catholics.

The Cliftondene area is a mixed district whose residents live peacefully together, but UDA elements in Glenbryn and other loyalist strongholds are intent on stopping what they regard as a Catholic tide. A former north Belfast nationalist councillor said: "They just hate it when they see kids arriving wearing Celtic shirts and playing with hurley-bats."

Last year the UDA was taken over by a new brigadier, nicknamed "Bonzer," who is believed to have asserted his authority by launching a previous wave of attacks in the adjoining Deerpark Road area. He has convictions for extortion and UDA membership.

A similar pattern is visible in a number of other north Belfast interface areas. In almost every case these violent campaigns have been unsuccessful. With large numbers of Protestants moving out to the suburbs and satellite towns, working-class and middle-class areas have become steadily more Catholic.