1994 IRA ceasefire - a decade on: Sectarianism is endemic in a state founded on mutual antagonism, and "peace" is a nervous and bitter thing, writes Dan Keenan, Northern News Editor.
"Antagonism flourished. Homes, churches and halls were daubed with slogans. Soccer fans clashed. Orange and nationalist bands provoked conflict, either by infringing on disputed territory or by evoking abuse from passers-by. Belfast Corporation had to discontinue band concerts in Falls Park because musicians were abused for playing God Save The Queen."
Sound familiar?
What may surprise some is that this account of everyday spats and clashes in Northern Ireland comes not from the current ceasefire era, but from 1962 and an earlier IRA cessation.
The IRA called off its Border campaign in February that year and dumped its arms. Following that, Belfast and the rest of the North returned to its norm - continuing low-level sectarian incidents, occasional violence and increased tension over the traditional marching season.
Sandbags remained in position at some RUC stations as officers dealt with occasional arson attacks, the odd petrol-bombing and acts of petty sectarianism.
Things declined two years later when a riot broke out in Divis Street in the lower Falls area over the removal of a Tricolour from a shop window - an incident which brought the young Rev Ian Paisley to prominence. It was the worst rioting the city had seen since the pogrom of 1935, which, interestingly, also took place against the backdrop of "peace".
Then, in June 1966 a UVF gang, including Gusty Spence, shot dead John Scullion in Milford Street off the Falls Road. Later that month, Peter Ward (18), another Catholic, was shot dead by the UVF on Malvern Street. These are the first entries in Lost Lives - an admirable (and indispensable) record of each Troubles fatality. The rest, as they say, is history.
Northern Ireland's history proves the concept of peace is, at best, a relative rather than an absolute concept. The 1960s were, until the later years of the decade, "peaceful". But the very notion was as qualified then as it is now. The quotation above, taken from Bob Purdie's book Politics in the Streets published by Blackstaff in 1990, details what a nervous and bitter thing Northern peace is. He cites incident after incident which illustrates the simmering hostility just below the North's apparently calm surface.
In July 1962 an Orange arch over the Coleraine to Dungiven road in Co Derry was burned down. Three RAF men were beaten up by unionists for interfering with another Orange arch in Lisnarrick, Co Tyrone. Two Catholic schoolgirls were arrested for singing a republican song during the Twelfth demonstrations.
A trainee nurse was bound over for producing a Tricolour pennant during an Orange march, a Co Donegal motor mechanic was also bound over for having "forgotten" to remove a Tricolour from his car. A tree in Bessbrook, Co Armagh, from which a Tricolour was flown was felled by an explosion and Stormont MPs debated the fact that the Union flag had been hoisted over a school used as a polling station.
In July 1962, some 47 employees at a religiously mixed linen plant walked out after management removed loyalist regalia hung on the walls to mark the Twelfth. In October 1966 a man was jailed for threatening a Catholic householder with a revolver and warning him not to interfere with loyalist bunting which had been placed on his house for the Twelfth. He got nine years.
It goes on and on. Rows, riots and disturbances apparently provoked by elections, flags, emblems, marches, and the singing of "party songs".
Summer 2004 still had its contentious marches, and another is still planned to pass a flashpoint at Ardoyne in north Belfast. But while some of the pettiness recorded above may have gone, the latent hatreds simmer on.
Perhaps it should not surprise that Northern Ireland's version of normality differs from everyone else's.
With a state founded on the basis of a mutual antagonism and its border decided by sectarian headcount, it is little wonder that sectarianism persists.
When the Belfast Telegraph triumphantly proclaimed in 1994 "It's over!", and the Irish News announced "A New Era", there was an implicit understanding that such bellowing page one headlines meant only that the worst of a paramilitary campaign had ended. The communal and political problems of Northern Ireland had most definitely not.
Since then Belfast's communities have become yet more acutely segregated and the notion of "our area" is ever more ingrained. Drumcree is proof enough of that.
Some interface areas in Belfast are marked by unoccupied (and unoccupiable) houses and the "peace line" walls around the nationalist Short Strand in loyalist east Belfast and in Ardoyne in the north of the city were heightened last year in a bid to halt attacks.
All this, as John Hume reiterates, in a city with the highest church-going rates in Europe.
The nihilistic violence and intolerance surrounding the Holy Cross school protests of 2001 proves that while 1994 and its ceasefires marked the end of something, it did not mean anything like the eradication of Northern Ireland's staple fear and hatred.
The dwindling loyalist population of the Fountain enclave on the west bank of the Foyle has been enduring what the Apprentice Boys call "the new Siege of Derry". A short distance away, near Craigavon Bridge, stand the now-famous statue of two figures representing the two communities reaching out towards each other. It is a work emblematic of the peace process. Their hands don't quite meet, however, and it is in that synapse that the signals from one side to the other often break down.
Belfast, Dungannon and Craigavon have witnessed racist attacks against immigrant communities. Loyalist residents of Donegall Pass have been warned by way of leaflet against the "yellow peril" of the significant Chinese community in south Belfast and the "threat" such people are held to pose to the ethnic purity of British Ulster.
In nearby decaying Sandy Row, a new apartment block which is home to a mix of middle-income Catholics, southerners, and some people from abroad, is referred to disparagingly as Vatican Square and has been attacked.
Estate agents in the loyalist paramilitary-strong Village area in south Belfast have been warned off letting property to ethnic minorities. One agent who did was petrol-bombed last January amid reports of new activity by the racist National Front and Combat 18.
Meanwhile, attacks against the homes of such people have multiplied. PSNI figures show 212 racist incidents occurred in the eight months before last Christmas, a dramatic rise on the previous year.
Public figures, from last year's Lord Mayor of Belfast, Martin Morgan, to the President, Mrs McAleese, have urged society to counter the flourishing anti-immigrant hostility in the city where both of them were born and raised.
As evidence mounts that such intolerance is on the rise, others claim hatred and acts of violence against immigrants were always there - it just went more unnoticed and unreported amid the worst of the Troubles. For all that, much progress - some symbolic and some actual - has been achieved. On the site of the IRA Poppy Day bombing in Enniskillen there is now the cross-community centre assisted and opened by former US president Bill Clinton in 2002.
And in May 1998 nearly 72 per cent of Northern voters passed the referendum endorsing the Belfast Agreement which outlined a desire to live in some form of peace - separately, if not alongside or among each other.
The present political impasse demonstrates what a difficult, protracted and messy business peace-making can be. Rising unionist hostility to the agreement and the fact that the DUP is now the largest party based on opposition to it has not yet negated the ethos of that agreement.
To this day it remains the foundation on which a new accommodation, founded by the ceasefires of 1994, will be built.