Early last Sunday morning in Ballymena, a 15-year-old Catholic schoolboy, Michael McIlveen, and two friends were making their way home from a local pizza parlour when they were set upon by a gang of Protestant youths wielding baseball bats. David Adams writes.
The two friends managed to escape, but Michael was cornered and badly beaten: he died in hospital of his injuries late on Monday evening. Throughout Northern Ireland, there was revulsion and outrage that an innocent child had been robbed of life simply because of his religion.
However, no one should pretend to be surprised that this sectarian killing has happened. Nor give credence to a growing tendency to see it as symptomatic only of a situation that pertains in Ballymena, regardless of that town having a long history of division and sectarian violence. For to do that, would be to avoid confronting a greater and far more generalised problem with society.
Ballymena is little different to anywhere else, in that sectarian attacks and clashes between rival gangs of young people are now commonplace throughout Northern Ireland.
Hardly a weekend goes past when you do not read or hear of someone having been seriously assaulted because of their perceived religious affiliation. Such is the prevalence and often vicious nature of these attacks, that it was only a matter of time before someone was killed.
If this tragedy had not unfolded in Ballymena then, sadly but undoubtedly, something similar would have occurred somewhere else.
For the death of young Michael McIlveen is a tragic indicator of a problem common to all of Northern Ireland. For decades, there have been those who have claimed that the conflict was essentially political and that religious tension was largely a by-product of years of violence, upheaval and political uncertainty.
The logic being, of course, that if only the paramilitaries would cease their campaigns and we could agree on an overarching political and constitutional arrangement then sectarianism would gradually disappear.
What has become painfully clear since the paramilitary ceasefires and the Belfast Agreement, is that, while politics and sectarianism are often inter-related, political progress alone will not heal sectarian divisions.
Sectarianism exists as a self-perpetuating, separate entity that must be tackled and legislated for in its own right. Regardless of the peace process and giant strides having been made on the political front, the two main communities here are more polarised than ever.
After more than a decade of relative peace, Northern Ireland still consists, largely, of two tribal groups living in almost complete isolation from, and opposition to, one another. In most areas, shared ground has long ago been carved up into separate Catholic and Protestant districts where only those of like persuasion are welcome. Even in the occasional mixed community of private-ownership housing, there is little real interaction between neighbours from differing religious backgrounds. In the main, people in Northern Ireland actually prefer to live, work and socialise amongst their own religious affiliates. The communities happily reside separately, in virtual parallel worlds to one another, where stereotyping and demonising is given full rein.
It is within that kind of society that we raise our children. Protestant and Catholic youngsters do not live on the same streets, they do not play together, they do not go to school together and they do not socialise together.
Most of them have never knowingly had contact - or at least not enough to form an opinion of their own - with anyone outside their own community until they leave school and start work. By which time, in all probability, enormous damage has already been done.
Many have been taught to distrust, or even hate, those from what amounts to an alien background. Added to this mix, are varying degrees of problems now common within any western society: a more general lack of respect for authority, a high proportion of young men having been raised without any positive male role model in the home, and widespread drug and alcohol abuse.
It is not surprising, then, that on the few occasions when young Protestants and Catholics do come into direct contact, more often than not, there is mutual suspicion and hostility. Given our situation, the wonder is not that sectarian violence amongst the young is so prevalent, but that we actually manage to turn out many decent, upstanding young citizens.
Politicians here have also been horrified at the killing of young Michael McIlveen, but many of them share responsibility for the perpetuation of divisions within Northern Ireland. Too often, on both sides, sectarian tensions have been deliberately raised for electoral gain. Neither can many politicians honestly claim to have done much to try to bring the two communities together.
If we are ever going to have normality in Northern Ireland, a greater task than anything to do with November 24th still confronts all of us. That is, the breaking down of sectarian barriers within our society.
Until we start to do that, sectarianism will remain immune from political progress and there will continue to be brutal deaths like that of young Michael McIlveen.