Her story of harassment and fear is one that is echoed time and again by Portadown's Catholics. Roisin was one of the few Catholics in the town living on a mixed street. The area was predominantly Protestant but her childhood there was very happy with good family and neighbours.

The last five years have soured that, however. She has "seen more in these last five years than I have in a lifetime. That was a shock to me. I know we've had 30 years of trouble and terrible things".

Nonetheless, the events of July 1995 and every year since have left their mark on her health and emotions. 1995, she says, was really bad.

"Me and my daughter were practically prisoners in our home for two days. We had to sit in the dark, terrified. When the night-time came it was worse. There was nothing other than men on the street. Very, very afraid. You could have reached out and touched the atmosphere. Basically, we had barricaded ourselves into the house. The two of us were in an awful state."

They called the police who moved a Land-Rover down to protect the house. "The police came to the door and asked if there was anywhere we could spend the night. We said, `We're home. This is the only home we have'." She added: "That was the year that Ian Paisley and David Trimble behaved like two children, jeering and delighted that they had marched the road. But they didn't appreciate or realise what my daughter and I went through. When you hear your child screaming out: `They're coming, mummy, they're coming'. It was terrible. I really believed that night we were going to die. I believed that they were going to kill us. I believe that they knew we were in the house."

The police told a neighbour they could no longer protect her. an Mac Cionnaith and another man " . . come to my door and wanted me to sign a petition regarding the Garvaghy Road. I told him that I didn't live on the Garvaghy Road and I also told him what had happened to us in 1995 and his answer to that was `we didn't envisage that' ". She describes 1996 as horrible: "The tension, the fear, the different rumours that were put about water going off, power going off. It was horrific. After 1995 I had become very ill and I was coming out of it again in May and June 1996 and wasn't feeling the best. I knew and was convinced that they were going to break into the street. I couldn't get it out of my head. I got my daughter together to leave. A man had to lead us past the burning buses, the burning cars.

"He told us when he put us into the car that we were to stay behind him and that if he got stopped we were to go straight back the way he brought us and stop for nobody. I drove around Portadown and past policemen with their arms folded because maybe they were thinking to themselves that this is it, this is as good as it gets. They seemed to be out of touch with everything."

She describes in horror that year's parade, men in groups with scarfs across their mouths. She didn't stay at home. "That night they broke into our home and an estimated £5-6000 worth of damage was done. You could feel the hatred in anything that was broken, anything that was smashed, the total hatred.

The march was blocked last year but the area was not left in peace. Roisin describes bands after bands after bands parading, marching. They arrived at 2 a.m. "I'll never forget it. I thought the helicopters had crashed there was that much banging and smashing. They [the RUC] set up big iron containers and blocked off the whole top of the street. It was horrible. I actually felt myself smothering, caged in.

"The parades went on and on and on and the taunting. And the shouting, dead men's names, what they'd do when they'd get us and all this talk."

The murder of a young Catholic council worker added to the tension. Roisin's car was stoned as she was going to the post office. She thought she was being shot at: "We heard this bang. The first thing into my head was that we were being shot. To myself I said that, but I said to my daughter `Get down, get down'. I can see them crawling on their bellies on the grass verge at the side of the bridge. I really believed it was shots and I just put my foot to the board. We could have been killed."

The intimidation during the day was added to by visits from masked men at night.

"There was one morning I got up early and came downstairs and could see nothing but the security light on. There was a man standing in the window watching me, all in black. I froze to the spot and something kept telling me to get to the phone. I threw myself to the phone, dialled 999 and the policeman had to stay with me on the phone the whole time. I sat under the stairs with the phone waiting for the bangs of them shooting at me."

She went on: "It was common to hear of masked men going into the right-of-way and masked men in cars and men with baseball bats and all the rest. This was a continuous thing that happened, people coming into the area. It was just a hell on earth. You were afraid of being seen going into the area or coming out. I'm a diabetic. There wasn't flesh on my body. You seem to walk about in permanent tension."

She was at home the night Constable Frank O'Reilly was killed by a loyalist blast bomb. The house shook, she says. But even more distressing was the cheering the loyalists made after the attack. It was sickening, she says.

She finally decided to move four months ago and is living in rented accommodation. She is looking for a new house in order to begin again. "We never gained anything by this killing," she says.