BELFAST, July 6: Violence flared Sunday night In Belfast and several other towns In Northern Ireland as angry demonstrators set fire to cars and built barricades after police and troops blocked a highly symbolic march by the Protestant Orange Order In Portadown, reports AFP.

In Belfast police twice fired rubber bullets to disperse demonstrators who attacked them with petrol bombs in the city centre.

By Sunday evening, more than 10 cars had been torched in Belfast alone, according to the security forces.

Several barricades of burning tyres went up in Protestant loyalist area of Belfast and In the towns of Ballymena in the north and Mlllsle. both radical loyalist strongholds as well as in Lisburn. Carrickefergues and Antrlam.

Police reported no casualUes or arrests.

In a separate incident, eight

people were arrested in Newry, a Catholic majority town in the south of the province, as they were trying to set fire to a Protestant building.

The situation was actually far more calm In Portadown itself where hundreds of organgement have settled in for a lengthy face-off with about 2,000 police and soldiers preventing them marching through a Catholic area of the town along a route used since 1807 by the Orange Order.

The recently created Independent Parades Commission banned the marchers from going down the Garvaghy Road through a staunchly republican area to avoid a repeat of the violence which marred the same march last year and in 1996.

Ine Orange Order had vowed to Ignore the ban Sunday but the 2.500 marchers were forced to stop half way along their route by an impressive deployment of police and troops.