Demonstrators opposing the Good Friday peace agreement that ended three decades of hostilities in Northern Ireland firebombed a police car Monday in Londonderry during a march on the agreement's 25th anniversary, officials said.
Police called for calm and said no officers were injured in the attack during an otherwise peaceful demonstration. No arrests were reported.
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Police had warned in advance that officers could be attacked in the Creggan neighborhood during the Easter Monday parade, for which official permission had not been granted, by republicans who opposed the U.S.-brokered peace deal reached April 10, 1998.
As several hundred people — many in black face masks — marched peacefully through the streets with flags, some youths in hoods and masks charged at a police Land Rover parked at the end of a street and pelted it with rocks and petrol bombs.
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“Our officers have come under attack in Creggan with petrol bombs and other objects thrown at their vehicle,” the Police Service of Northern Ireland tweeted. “We would appeal for calm.”
The violence erupted just as President Joe Biden was set to visit the region. Biden will travel Tuesday to Belfast to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday peace accord before heading south to the Republic of Ireland, where he will address the Dublin parliament.
He is then set to visit Ballina, the town from which one of Biden's great-great grandfathers left for the United States in 1850. In Ballina, he’s due to deliver a speech Friday in front of the 19th-century cathedral, which local lore says was built partly using bricks supplied by his great-great-great grandfather, Edward Blewitt, a brickmaker and civil engineer.
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Biden also plans to visit the Cooley Peninsula in County Louth, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) from Ballina on Ireland’s east coast. His great-grandfather, James Finnegan, left the mountainous, wind-battered peninsula as a child in 1850, one of more than a million Irish people who emigrated during the famine years.
