Opposite the wasteland that once was Johnny Adair's kingdom is a building housing services for Shankill families: mothers' and toddlers' group, family support workers. The centre is busy. Paramilitary feuds mean nights full of gunshots and swearing, hand-to-hand fighting in the street. Children still wake up in the morning to be fed and dressed.
The gable walls of Adair-land are covered in murals, some the stuff of nightmares. High on a wall a creature with fleshless skull and the rags of a uniform trudges forward, gun in one hand, Ulster flag in the other. The background is heaped with bodies. The figure of Death loiters, cowled in black. Below the warrior ghoul is the one word: "Shankill".
Why would any community choose such a self-portrait? It is less than half a mile from Shankill to Falls, where recent murals show Turkish hunger-strikers and republican demands for more change in the police service, where Gerry Adams is photographed listening to a lecture or opening a drop-in centre for families bereaved by "joyriders".
The Falls seems to be moving on while the Shankill has become sicker: the difference goes beyond image. Catholic west Belfast has many problems and republicans retain their sinister side, but there is a shared enterprise and a machine to deliver communal expectations. The place connects with the wider world.
That world's eyes are on Iraq, the buzzwords are "regime change". In the Shankill, a quarrel among gangsters has left a once-proud district leaderless and demoralised. The question is whether a brutal, corrupt regime can be replaced without significant local input. Unionist politicians say this is the moment to wrest control from the paramilitaries. A public servant unkindly says in private: "A big part of the problem is that unionist leaders don't talk to those people in a consistent way, and they feed their grievances. One minute the paramilitaries are useful, the next they're thugs."
The Shankill once had a working-class elite, its men assured of shipyard and engineering jobs, proud of their craftsmanship and industry: proud too of their perceived superiority over Falls Road Catholics. That sense of superiority has long gone: the Shankill is Belfast's worst address.
The district was always different, its politicians and most of its clergy outside the Protestant and Unionist mainstream. It was represented by cranky independents, worshipped in small mission halls. The decline of traditional employment overlapped with the Troubles and the rise of the paramilitaries. Republicans bombed and shot up the Shankill, local loyalists killed many more Catholics in return. The Shankill Butchers made the district synonymous with sectarian slaughter. Sense of community slipped away as redevelopment uprooted old streets, the upwardly mobile fleeing the violence for the suburbs and in many cases cutting all connection.
In the Catholic Falls, emphasis on education to compensate for Protestant monopoly of semi-skilled labour has paid off in the post-industrial market. Shankill primary schools turn out hardly any kids who pass exams. It is all too clear that people have neither energy nor will left to lift the district. Drug-dealing, extortion and loan-sharking continue: the imprisoned Adair has merely been displaced. Handing in a few pipe-bombs does not mean a better breed of paramilitary is taking over.
Jaded onlookers and former players agree sadly that the promise of paramilitary politics has gone. "Time to say it's not going to happen," says a former Shankill resident. Yet during his latest visit to help reinvigorate the peace process, Tony Blair tossed out the promise of an initial £3 million to encourage an alternative "loyalist voice".
ALMOST nine years ago, shortly before the loyalist ceasefire, there was a Shankill conference called "Loyalist Voices". Hundreds came to discuss unionism with the Rev Ian Paisley, the Ulster Unionist MP John Taylor, Iris Robinson of the DUP, then emergent UVF spokesmen David Ervine and Billy Hutchinson, and an Orange Order man.
Paisley read a theological paper and left before questions. Taylor denied Unionist Party responsibility for failings in housing, employment and welfare, blamed British direct rule, and said there were two races in Ireland. The Orange Order man said Orangeism was accused of dividing Protestants and Catholics - no bad thing if it preserved the freedoms of the Glorious Revolution. Iris Robinson and Billy Hutchinson shouted at each other, Hutchinson asking why she condemned murder when her party "terrified young men into fighting" with its constant warnings that Protestant Ulster was doomed.
Women in the audience said fundamentalism had stunted their lives and asked why Robinson was so anti-feminist. Ervine was fresh, innovative. It felt like the start of a debate but turned out to be an isolated moment, and a misleading one.
The best that can be said today is that the Shankill's violence is more like Limerick's recent turmoil than that of the Troubles, rooted as it is in rivalries over drugs and territory.
Initiative will have to come first from the outside, then hook in local people. A £3 million handout will not do it: saving the Shankill must reach back to fundamentals, for this is a deeply disturbed district which needs analysis, a thoughtful programme of help, and much drive to prevent it producing more dysfunctional generations.