© Photo: PALoyalist Protestors converge at Belfast city hall
"If your wife was dying, what would you be doing?" he shouted. "Protestants? You don't own us. Take yourselves home - show a bit of respect for people."
They took no notice. Well, they laughed. "We're not in the hospital," one of them told him. Then the crowd started cheering. "Here we are, here we are, here we are," they chanted.
Not long afterwards, the bricks, the bottles and the petrol bombs started to come over, smashing on the paint-splotched Tarmac at our feet.
When the rain came, putting the petrol-bombs out of action, primary schoolchildren started trying to break up the kerbstones to throw them at the police Land Rovers, instead.
Nearby, a hijacked Belfast Metro double-decker reached its final terminus - in the middle of the road, on fire, its skeleton consumed by the flames.
A little further north, in Carrickfergus, a small, admiring crowd watched about 50 masked men take on the police, who fought back with water cannon and plastic bullets. Many of the spectators were masked, too. Several had brought their children - and even the children, in their pushchairs, wore masks.
Welcome to Operation Standstill, Loyalist protesters' most ambitious attempt yet to cripple Northern Ireland in the six-week crisis over a flag.
On Facebook and Twitter (where else?) no fewer than 21 road blockades across the province - and two in Britain - were announced, to begin precisely at 6pm on Friday.
By 4pm, central Belfast was emptying as office workers and shoppers hurried to leave while they still could. "We're just playing it by ear," said Christine, at the Fruiterama greengrocers in Castle Street, looking at the clock.
"When the street goes quiet, it's time to close."
By about 7pm, mostly peacefully, at least 12 of the main routes out of the city were blocked. There were still plenty of ways round, but public transport had stopped functioning.
Anyone without a car was effectively trapped, and most of those with one did not want to risk it on the streets.
Matt Baggott, Northern Ireland's chief constable, calls the flag crisis "the most challenging period we have had in the last decade." How did it start? When, and how, will it end? Could it threaten a wider return to violence?
The demonstrators and their leaders will tell you that the protests and rioting which have gripped parts of Belfast since its city council voted, on December 3, not to fly the Union Flag each day are impromptu outbursts of pent-up rage from working-class Protestants unhappy with the new, improved Northern Ireland.
"I'm a hundred per cent sure this has happened spontaneously," says Willie Frazer, their spokesman. "The flag was the final straw in the continuing erosion of everything we see as British."
What these people say is not exactly insincere, or untrue. It is deeply felt, partly spontaneous, and partly true. But it is a long way from the whole truth. The truth about Northern Ireland riots and protests is that they are very seldom entirely unplanned.
About 50 yards down from the Carrickfergus ruck, some of the shops were still open.
In the block of flats right next to the battle, as flames from burning wheelie-bins lit up the street below her window, an old woman was doing the ironing. A taxi waited round the corner to take the rioters home afterwards. Punctually at 9pm, the trouble ended.
It's not just the riots themselves that exude a faint scent of choreography. If this were a wholly undirected outbreak of working-class Protestant anger, you might expect to see it across most or all of Loyalist Ulster.
But so far, by and large, only two working-class Protestant areas - East Belfast and the Newtownabbey and Carrickfergus district of south-east Antrim - have decided to get violent.
Even other parts of poor Protestant Belfast, such as the Shankill Road, have been peaceful.
Rioting raged in East Belfast in the first half of last week. But on Friday, the tap there was turned off, and the action switched to Carrickfergus and Newtownabbey.
As it happens, neither of those places is part of Belfast; they have their own councils, both of which still fly the Union Jack over their headquarters every day.
What East Belfast, Carrickfergus and Newtownabbey do have in common, however, are maverick factions of the Loyalist paramilitary organisation, the Ulster Volunteer Force.
"We've got no doubt whatever that this is coming from the UVF," says Terry Spence, leader of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland.
The East Belfast leader of the UVF - the so-called "Beast from the East" - was not at home to callers when The Telegraph dropped in to his small terraced house in a quiet side street.
His white reinforced front door doesn't have a knocker or a bell, but there are five CCTV cameras just in case anyone tries to murder him again.
Two of his lieutenants have been spotted in the background helping direct the main East Belfast riots.
Security sources say they are acting with the Beast's consent, if not the UVF leadership's active involvement, and he could end the trouble in the area whenever he wanted.
But the Beast, and the rest of the UVF's leadership, have an urgent problem - a supergrass called Gary Haggarty, a former leader of the organisation in Carrickfergus and Newtownabbey, who has reportedly named every senior UVF man over the past 20 years. A trial based on his evidence is expected soon.
There is a widespread belief that the paramilitaries are heightening the violence to make a point about the dangers of riling Loyalists.
The flag issue clearly is, in part, a pretext. The last time it came up at Belfast City Hall, in 2004, the political party linked to the UVF, the Progressive Unionist Party, backed precisely the option they are railing against now - flying the Union Jack over the building only on a small number of designated days.
Even at the beginning of the current row, when consulted by the council, the PUP indicated that it would accept the designated days option if flying the flag full-time "is not possible".
From the other side, too, the flag issue is partly fraudulent. It only reared its head after pressure from Sinn Fein, the Republican party, which protested that it had received complaints from constituents that flying the Union Jack was "offensive" and "intimidating."
The actual number of complaints was six. In a survey done by the council before the change, two-thirds of visitors to the City Hall said they had not even noticed there was a flag - and only eight per cent felt uncomfortable or unwelcome because of it.
Even 68 per cent of Catholic visitors said they didn't mind, or actually supported, the flag flying every day.
Yet the issue is only partly fake. The flag taps into working-class Protestants' fears that they are losing ground - above all, in Belfast, where Sinn Fein is now the largest single party on the council and Catholics may soon outnumber Protestants in the city as a whole. In power-sharing Northern Ireland that shouldn't matter, of course.
The kids out rioting weren't even born during The Troubles. But the reason it does matter is because of the deepest failing of the peace process, the almost total failure to bridge the divide between the two working-class communities.
The junction of Bryson Street and Newtownards Road, the main flashpoint for the East Belfast violence, is also what they call an "interface area" with the Catholic road of Short Strand close by.
The Protestant houses opposite have wire mesh on their windows to stop the Catholics smashing them. "We get attacked every week, with bottles and golf balls," says one resident.
On the other side of the street is St Matthew's Catholic church. In the last six months, the churchyard's iron railings have had to be reinforced with an eight-foot fence to stop Protestants from across the road trying to burn it down.
Even in the worst days of the Troubles, Catholic Bryson Street had a link to the Protestant end of Madrid Street. This is now bricked off, one of the "peace walls" that have proliferated, not reduced, since the Good Friday Agreement.
Yesterday, in this area, fairly serious clashes broke out between Protestant and Catholic. The police used plastic bullets and a water cannon to separate them.
If that sort of thing starts to spread, then the peace may be at risk. The dissident Republican terrorist threat has already grown, with several of the main groups joining forces in July, a prison officer murdered in November, and weaponry of increasing sophistication found.
Ninety police officers were personally targeted by terrorists last year, says Mr Spence, who wants a thousand more police.
Most experts still think a return to full-scale violence is very unlikely. "The big deal has been done. I shouldn't underplay how bad the flag thing is, but it is a bagatelle," says Paul Bew, professor of politics at Queen's University, Belfast.
"It's giving great pleasure to Catholics because the Protestants have lived up to cretinous stereotype."
As Mr Bew points out, there has been no upsurge in terror activity by Loyalist groups. And after the collapse of the Republic's economy, the Loyalists' great fear of a united Ireland looks less likely than ever. Even the protests on Friday, for all their scale, were less extensive than many had expected.
How exactly this does end, though, is hard to know. The very incoherence of the protesters and their aims makes them much harder to deal with. "It's not like the old days, when people like me or [First Minister] Peter Robinson could make six calls. You don't have that level of control and knowledge any more," admits Mike Nesbitt, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party.
On Friday night, the Belfast bourgeoisie fought back with their own "Operation Sit-in."
It trended on Twitter. Quite a few of the restaurants stayed open, with a sort of Blitz spirit among the diners. But for the indefinite future, probably until the protesters get tired or until some major catastrophe triggers a rethink, the city's post-peace shopping and café society is effectively held hostage by the people in shell suits.
Belfast's middle classes, like many on the mainland and the puzzled tourists waiting at deserted bus stops, rather assumed that Northern Ireland had been "fixed." As the last 40 days have shown, it really hasn't.
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