The Holy Cross story
Posted by Jim on August 21, 2026
Where we ‘doing the right thing’?: The Holy Cross story seen through the eyes of those who walked the gauntlet of hate
25 years on from loyalist blockade of girls’ primary school key figures open up about their role in the dark chapter in Northern Ireland’s troubled past
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By John Manley, Politics Correspondent
August 21, 2026 at 1:14pm BST
“It was absolutely terrifying… the scariest thing I ever did,” says Elaine Burns as she recalls walking to school with her children along the Ardoyne Road in the autumn of 2001.
What ordinarily was an everyday routine became the centre of global media attention, as young children and their parents walked a gauntlet of hate where they were subjected to sectarian abuse, pelted with missiles, including balloons filled with urine, and even had a blast bomb thrown at them.
The root causes of the Holy Cross protest, in which loyalists vociferously and violently objected to parents from nationalist Ardoyne escorting their children to school, are perhaps as complex as Northern Ireland’s history itself.
The school, by an accident of history and shifting demographics, is an outpost situated in the overwhelmingly Protestant Glenbryn area.
Throughout the Troubles, parents had taken their children to school, largely without incident. However, in the summer of 2001, three years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, tensions in the area escalated.
Mrs Burns, a former pupil at Holy Cross girls’ school and an advice worker in Ardoyne who served on the school’s board of governors, believes that already fraught community relations deteriorated noticeably with the arrival of families displaced from the Shankill during the UVF-UDA feud the previous year.
Before this influx, she says, Glenbryn’s population was ageing and many houses lay empty.
“People here shared all the same shops and the Post Office,” she says.
“I think there was a lack of understanding when they moved into an area which is very fluid, and schoolchildren come and go. They weren’t accustomed to living cheek by jowl with people from the other side.”
Professor Peter Shirlow, who was conducting research along the interface in the run-up to the dispute, also highlights the arrival of members of the UDA’s C-Company but he also recalls attacks on Protestant children in a playpark and incidents of verbal intimidation.
“The decline in nearby Protestant communities in Oldpark and Manor Street also led to a sense of being forced out and that Upper Ardoyne would be next,” he says.
Whereas the school had been attacked and burned on a number of occasions, and previously flags had been flown from lampposts and kerbstones painted nearby, in the run-up to the 2001 Twelfth, it was felt the actions of the loyalists became increasingly antagonistic.
The then school principal Anne Tanney says “there was always a feeling that we were aliens in their territory”.
Nevertheless, there were ongoing mutual efforts to build and maintain relations with staff and pupils at nearby Wheatfield Primary School, while the Holy Cross’s educational ethos placed a strong emphasis on the Christian values of tolerance and respect.
Inside the entrance hall of the school a quote sourced from an old copy of Readers’ Digest is displayed: “If we’d been born where they were born, we’d believe what they believe.”
“We had done a lot of cross community work and believed that helped the situation but people whipped up hatred and fear, which is an awful shame,” says Mrs Tanney.
An incident in late June, prior to the summer holidays, in which it’s claimed a loyalist putting flags on lampposts was knocked off a ladder, is often cited as the trigger for what followed.
Over the coming days, loyalists blockaded the school and at night there were violent clashes on the interface, with petrol bombs hurled and shots fired.
For the final days of term, the fraction of children who went to school took a detour that involved crossing a playing field and entering the school at the rear through a gap cut in the perimeter fence.
Sinn Féin MLA Gerry Kelly acknowledges that the Glenbryn residents had some legitimate grievances, though not all related to their proximity to Ardoyne.
“But those grievances did not equate to or in any way give legitimacy to the actions that were taken,” he says.
“Nobody could have convinced me to protest outside a girls’ school. I just wouldn’t have. You would’ve just known straight away to catch yourself on.”
The veteran republican says there was a lack of leadership on the unionist side. Nigel Dodds had become the area’s MP weeks earlier, while other prominent politicians included Nelson McCausland of the DUP, who was a councillor at the time, then-Ulster Unionist MLA Fred Cobain, and Billy Hutchinson of the UVF-aligned Progressive Unionist Party.
“Without naming names, they didn’t lead; they were led by the emotional voice in the room,” Mr Kelly says.
Elaine Burns also identifies a leadership vacuum among the Glenbryn residents: “To take their frustration out on young children was not the right thing to do.
“There was a lack of leadership within their community that would’ve enabled them to articulate what their needs were and what was the best way to get those needs met.”
Fr Aidan Troy had arrived at the Holy Cross Monastery from Rome during the summer along with Fr Gary Donegan. He was elected chairman of the school’s board of governors a month before the protest resumed.
Throughout the school holidays, via existing cross-community channels, there were earnest but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to defuse tensions.
Ahead of the new term, the Passionist priest got the parents together and asked them what they wanted to happen on September 3. Their response was unambiguous.
“They said they wanted to go to school up the Ardoyne Road. Full stop,” says Fr Troy.
“They told me: ‘We’re not protesting; we’re not demonstrating; we’re not proving a point. It is a constitutional right to go to take your child to school.’”
At the time, Church of Ireland rector in Ardoyne Rev Stewart Heaney urged a “return to the status quo prior to June 19”, whereby the children would be allowed to go to school “without protest”.
“Christians cannot sit easily with that position,” he said of the blockade.
On the first day of the new term, and for some very young children, their first day at school, the attempted blockade resumed, with the RUC and British Army forcing a path through the protesters.
Visibly upset parents and children were verbally abused at close quarters, while bottles and stones rained down on them.
“I don’t think they envisaged how vicious it was going to be, so the policing wasn’t appropriate and it didn’t provide the level of protection to keep people safe going to school,” she says.
The RUC’s tactics were different the following day, with a cordon created up the middle of the road, with protestors at each side. A blast bomb was thrown from the crowd, which according to loyalists, was aimed at the police. However, the explosive device caused panic and fear among parents and children, some of whom were forced to retreat to safety rather than continue to the school gates.
“As a mummy, you questioned yourself every day over whether your were doing the right thing,” says Elaine Burns, who told her four-year-old daughter that the loud bang of the blast bomb was fireworks to mark her first days at school.
“You had to be also mindful of the trauma your child was going through but at the same time, you have to take a stance. It was our children’s primary school.”
Both Fr Troy and Gerry Kelly were separately asked to accompany the parents on the walk to school.
The Sinn Féin MLA recalls how the request presented him with a dilemma.
“I felt torn. I told them I’d be proud to walk up with them and it’d be a privilege, but I was honest with them in saying that I’d become the story. I was willing to do whatever they wanted but I didn’t want it to distract from what the innocent children and the parents were going through,” he says, adding that most parents understood his reservations.
“It haunted me a bit but I think it was the right decision.”
Fr Troy too was reluctant to walk with the parents, believing he’d become the focus of the protestors’ ire but agreed after a number of mothers stressed that he’d be their “insurance”.
“People think I was a big brave fella but I was terrified,” he recalls.
“The screaming and shouting … all the ‘Father Troy’s a paedophile’ stuff… everyone’s seen it.”
When the children made it to school, the crowd of protestors would disperse before returning at home time.
The priority inside for principal Anne Tanney and her staff was to ensure “everything was normal”.
“My idea was keep the routine as usual and don’t show the children that you’re afraid,” she says.
“Any child who seemed to be particularly afraid or whatever, we would’ve kept them in the morning and talked to them. We used to get bouquets of flowers and send the children around with these flowers to different classrooms and get them involved.
“Being a Catholic school and having very strong Christian principles, our idea was not to escalate anything but to help the children to deal with what was happening, and to make sure that we would have the reconciliation afterwards, and that some good would come of it – although it was an awful thing and you couldn’t imagine anything good coming out of it.”
Elaine Burns recalls how the protestors’ tactics varied as the weeks passed.
“At the beginning, they were very loud with shouting and klaxons but then they went into like an almost silent protest, while at other times they were dressed in Mexican hats. You were asking yourself: ‘What the hell?’.”
The walk to school, while far from routine, took on an air of predictability.
“After a while, it became like a play in the theatre,” recalls Mrs Burns.
“You’d get up the road and the Army would open the curtain and you walked on the stage, and there’d be the audience shouting abuse at you. It was pathetic.”
There were lighter moments too, for instance at Halloween when two fathers walked up dressed as Laurel and Hardy, joking with others about “the fine mess you’ve got us into”.
There were some on the Ardoyne side, though not that many, according to Gerry Kelly, who advocated a response from the IRA, which at this stage had been on ceasefire for four years.
He recalls at the early public meetings, people in the crowd shouting: “Where’s the IRA? You need to do something about this.”
“It’s was just the wrong thing but was it said? Yes, it was. In fairness, it was one or two people and I just talked it down. I brought them through what it would mean and all of that, and I said: ‘Look, that’s not going to happen’.”
Others called for counter protests, which were likewise “knocked back”.
“I found that the further you got away from an interface, the more militant people became, not less,” he says.
The plight of the pupils and their parents made international headlines, and they received support from across the world, with the school receiving thousands of cards with messages of good will. Among those who visited the school at the time was US civil rights campaigner Minnijean Brown-Trickey, one of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African American students who successfully challenged racial segregation at a school in Arkansas.
South African anti-apartheid campaigner Archbishop Desmond Tutu was also a visitor.
The global media focus dissipated due to events in New York on September 11, however, the ferocity of the protest prevailed with little prospect of an agreed resolution.