DUP assembly member for North Belfast Brian Kingston called it an “utterly appalling” attack.<\/p>\n
He said the former church building had closed about five years ago.<\/p>\n
“No-one wanted to take it on since,” he told BBC News NI.<\/p>\n
“There are many people seeking to regenerate the Shankill Road, to bring derelict buildings back into use.”<\/p>\n
“This totally undermines this work.<\/p>\n
“The vast majority of the people on the Shankill are opposed to arson attacks and opposed to attacks on anyone.<\/p>\n
“Those responsible have done a great disservice to this community.” <\/p>\n
Sinn F\u00e9in MP Paul Maskey said those responsible “do nothing but damage their own communities”.<\/p>\n
“Targeting a building because of who owns it is despicable, especially when areas are crying out for jobs and investment,” he said. <\/p>\n
North Belfast councillor Carl Whyte, from the SDLP, called the attack “devastating”.<\/p>\n
“When I visited there were bags of food still sitting in the doorway, a reminder that these are ordinary people trying to run a business and support their families,” he said.<\/p>\n
“The owners and staff were providing a service to the community and have much more to offer than those who have targeted their business.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DUP assembly member for North Belfast Brian Kingston called it an “utterly appalling” attack. He said the former…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":624815,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-624814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}