BVC World Service and now witness history with me Rachel Naylor. Today I'm going to take

you back 21 years to a violent sectarian dispute in Belfast. It made headlines around the

world as it took place outside of primary school, I've been speaking to one of the pupils

mums.

It's the 19th of June 2001. Elaine Burns is at work in North Belfast. It's the last

week before the summer holidays and she's looking forward to taking her daughters away

to their caravan on the coast at Balikassal. Then, I got a phone call from one of my family

just to say, look, you need to get up to the school. There's an incident has happened

and we're not sure if the children are safe and I just dropped everything in the end

ran. Like it's the fastest of every run of my life let me tell you. When I arrived

to mean it was just, it was like a sing from hell. It was full-on, rat punching, kick-in

people had, you know, iron bars. There was big lumps of road and people weren't actually

beaten each other. It was just something you'd have saw out of that movie.

What was going through your mind when you saw what was happening?

God fair and terrible, just to mean took over. I was in a fit of crann and mummies were

shaking. We couldn't then get to the school because the road was blocked off essentially

and we were terrified. We didn't know if the children were safe in the school, was the

school under attack. It was just that absolute sense of fear.

Fortunately, her eight-year-old daughter, Leona, was safe.

The mysterious rioting so far this year in Northern Ireland came after days of rising

sectarian tensions in one of North Belfast's interface areas where Catholic and Protestant

estates are side by side.

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