A glimpse behind the headlines of a bad week in the North reveals better news, but you need to know where to look, suggests Dan Keenan
Last January the Irish Congress of Trade Unions sponsored a half-day of action in protest at the murder by the UDA of postal worker Danny McColgan. Mr Tom Gillen, one of the organisers, spoke to The Irish Times that week and said the measure of success would be if Danny's murder was the last.
This week's murder of Gerard Lawlor in north Belfast, again in cold and clinical fashion by the same organisation, seems to give Mr Gillen, and the thousands who turned out to march against sectarianism and the murder it fosters, the answer they don't want to hear and will not accept.
Many outside the North continue to roll their eyes at the persistence of nihilism, not just in parts of Belfast but elsewhere, too, while others wash their hands of the whole messy business that is peacemaking after enduring conflict.But despite the mayhem at sectarian interfaces, protests against Catholic girls going to school and sporadic murder in Belfast, Donaghmore and Castlewellan, widespread trouble has not been ignited across the North as would have happened years ago.
What was largely missed when the IRA apologised for death and injury to "non-combatants" was the scale of the horror in July 1972 and the relative - yet far from complete - calm that exists now. More than 100 died in this month 30 years ago out of a total of 400 for the year. July 1972 was marked not only by Bloody Friday but by the bombing of Claudy as well.
This year, despite deep political unease, the persistence of sectarian tension in the minefield that is north Belfast and the sporadic recurrence of murder, it has appeared too easy to ignore what has been achieved since Good Friday 1998.
But the difficult truth is it takes more than four years of a painstakingly constructed peace deal to eradicate the suspicion and hatred of one community for another which has endured for decades.
For all the paramilitary-style beatings, the interface rioting and the open-ended soap opera that is the political process here, the North is moving inexorably in the right direction.
Behind the all-too-apparent scenes of riot-torn streets and funerals of the murdered, and amid the din of us-and-them politics, the building work goes on.
Mr Trimble and Mr Durkan, summoning up what gravitas they can, insist there is no crisis at their joint office in Stormont, no crisis in the Assembly chamber and no crisis around the Executive table.
Even with the DUP mounting its token protest and staying away from meetings. There is no crisis between London and Dublin or within the North-South bodies, where so much good work has gone on barely noticed.
Compared to July 1972 there has been a revolution in Northern Ireland, and across much of it a new banal normality is settling down. Despite the bad omens served up by the conflict around Short Strand in June, the Twelfth has passed off relatively peacefully and Drumcree continues to die its slow death.Such a backdrop serves to make the violence of the past week yet more stark and the hatred that spawns it more obvious and therefore obscene.
Father Aidan Troy said, after the worst of the violence in his Holy Cross parish, it wasn't a case of being back at square one, it was worse than that. And that is true of other parishes in Belfast this week.
It is not inconceivable that as things settle elsewhere, the situation in a small handful of localities actually worsens, sectarianism entrenches and bitterness erupts. For the people who live there, housing plans, better schools and new roads often take second place to demands for higher walls and security screens.
For unionists in particular, the progress proclaimed by politicians from Whitehall to Stormont to Hillsborough seems a cruel mirage. They see, instead, loss of power and fragmentation of the once all-powerful unionist monolith. They see nationalist "gains" as the flip side of unionist losses and categorical assurances from Tony Blair, John Reid and others as little more than double-speak.
Such people feel lied to, betrayed and patronised. They feel, too, that they have been backed into a corner - not the position from which to construct a new and fairer Northern Ireland.
What is needed in addition to the obvious requirements of effective policing and political leadership is the ability to plot a course away from this sense of threat and defeat. Then and only then, when their grievances and concerns are addressed effectively, will their hatred diminish.