We watch - in disbelieving horror - as loyalist mobs stone Catholic infants on their way to school, almost as if disregard for children's lives were new in the North. The truth is that a disregard for the lives of children has made these Troubles possible; and Troubles they are, for we can no longer maintain the fiction that the peace process has brought peace.
I once helped carry an injured Catholic boy into a car in Ardoyne. He had been shot - a ricochet in the head during serious street fighting. He was 13 - as I discovered later - but looked about ten. Minutes later, and just around the corner, I saw a young Protestant man poleaxed by an IRA sniper. As he lay on the ground, other Protestants gave him first aid. Despite the heavy bloood loss from his stomach wound, he looked as if would be OK. And as it happens, he was.
I said to one of those Protestants minding him that a little Catholic boy had just been shot around the corner. The loyalists cheered. "I hope the wee bastard's f***ing dead," cried one. And, as it happens, he was.
Respect for children
One of the first things people write off in time of conflict is respect for children and the inviolability of their childhood. To fight a war must mean a willingness to make children fatherless. Measure by measure, those who wage war move from willingness to make children fatherless, to making them homeless, to making them motherless, until finally they're ready to take whatever remains.
Three years ago, the murder of the Quinn boys shocked all those people who'd been lulled by the hypocritical odours of the peace process into thinking murder had been banished from men's hearts in the North; but of course it had not. Why should it have been? Had murder not been declared a passport to power? Had not murderers jauntily walked free? Those who firebombed the Quinns' home knew they were killing children - and knew, moreover, that in the diseased, consequence-free world of peace-processland, they could not be properly punished.
As it is, so it was, both in the court of law and at the bar of history. If Irish nationalism had chosen to learn from the past, it would have opted to remember the 29 Dublin children killed in the 1916 Rising. Instead, it chose to remember and celebrate those who started it.
Do you remember Tracy Munn? Aged two when killed by an IRA bomb on the Shankill Road. Colin Nicholl? Seventeen months when killed by the same bomb. Angela Gallagher? She was 18 months of age, when hit and killed by a ricochet from an IRA sniper. There are many more.
It would not be worth reciting these names, except they are embedded in the psyche of the loyalists of North Belfast, who in their rancour, in their pathological loathing of Catholics, in their murderous self-pity, are a breed apart. The atrocities of the IRA have in their own demented minds vindicated the bigotry which was already a deep-dyed part of their culture, and justified the terrible murders with which they expressed that hatred.
Not even in that hatred can they possibly excuse the rock, bottle and pipe-bomb ambushes of infants as they processed to school. For this is wickedness distilled. A passage of concentration-camp killers escorting their offspring could never have justified such an unspeakable offence against civilisation.
Right of passage
But what of the nationalist parents, who, the morning after a night of loyalist rioting with gunfire and grenade, almost like the ground-crew of fighter pilots, neatly dressed their four-year-old children knowing what lay ahead? What cause was served by such actions, other than that of their greater tribe? And how could these parents seriously maintain that they were right to jeopardise their children, for no more than a symbolic right of passage, and for the temple of their gods? And what of the mother who allowed her daughter to choose her course of action, and when the girl chose to walk, then escorted her? Thus she waived parental responsibility before a child's submission to the clan. A parent's personal duty is subsumed into some greater whole, and the powers that bind a family, like those that bind an atom, are unleashed upon the enemy.
Moreover, one of the most active nationalist leaders, Brendan Mailey, is a killer - he murdered an unarmed police officer, Raymond Carroll, as he worked on his car near Ardoyne. Another prominent figure on the nationalist side, Norman Hardy, first achieved eminence by shooting dead two local Protestants, 17-year old Heather Thompson and 24-year old John McClean.
Peace process
Every Protestant in the area knows this - knows that President McAleese even shook the hand of the most notorious and unrepentant Protestant-killer in Ardoyne, Bic McFarlane. And how does all that make them feel? Similarly, the leader of the loyalists is John White, one of the most terrible killers of the entire Troubles, a savage who now solemnly gives interviews as the "community leader" which the "peace process" has turned him into, just as it has done his opposing confrΦres.
This is what the "peace process" has achieved. It has turned killers into local barons whose tribal powers are such that within the community, respect for childhood is subordinated to a blind loyalty to the tribe. Meanwhile, the very force whose courage and sense of duty kept the Ardoyne children alive is being Pattenised into a human-rights enforcing, I-share-your-pain, dance troupe, deliberately lacking any riot-control skills. With God knows what surprises before us, the madness proceeds.