Seventeen police officers were injured late Wednesday and early Thursday as Roman Catholic and Protestant rioters clashed with authorities near a Catholic school for girls that was the focus of months of violence last fall.
Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary, John Reid, said 200 officers and 200 soldiers had been deployed to restore calm.
Officers said they fired plastic bullets, hitting two people.
By dawn Thursday, the protests had subsided, but officials closed the school as a precaution.
Police said the violence began when they were attacked with stones, fireworks and gasoline bombs and that several police vehicles were set afire outside Holy Cross Primary School in the divided Ardoyne area of north Belfast.
At the time, a police spokesman said, parents were picking up their children after school.
Thirty to 50 people were involved in the riot, police said.
The school was the target of three months of demonstrations by Protestants, who blocked a nearby road and shouted insults at the schoolgirls and their parents.
