Although there are all too many on the peace process circuit who get a frisson from the whiff of cordite, I am not among them. Although I have two close friends who were once terrorists, there is nothing romantic about the way they view their violent past; they are both obsessed with trying to save the young from following in their bloodstained footsteps.
I am outraged that fashionable spokesmen for paramilitary groups who hate each other make common cause against those boring old constitutionalists who want weapons decommissioned; and no amount of peace-and-vision rhetoric will convince me that any decent person should ever vote for Gerry Adams, David Ervine, John White or their followers.
Against a backdrop of a phoenix arising from the ashes, the republican leadership boast that they have lifted their people off their knees. The truth is rather that in their fiefdoms, 30 years of murder and thuggery have caused enormous suffering to an increasingly brutalised Catholic underclass. Republican paramilitaries killed more Catholics than did loyalists and the security forces combined, while their propagandists instilled in their community a preposterous sense of victimhood: not so much the Chosen People as the Most Oppressed People Ever. It is hardly surprising that those at the bottom of the heap wonder why their loved ones died or spent their youth in prison so that Martin McGuinness could be a minister in Stormont, and begin to look kindly on the "Real IRA".
But if republican ghettos are bad, their loyalist equivalents are infinitely worse, for there is also the underlying nihilism that emerges when a community's identity is under threat. To wander about the Shankill Road and its environs is to appreciate the devastation wrought by well-meaning people in Dublin and London who understand nothing of this vulnerable community, yet who daily take decisions that make its members' condition worse by further eroding their sense of self. Every assault on British symbols adds to the sense of fear and insecurity that helps the violent to flourish.
As someone from a Dublin Catholic background who has spent a great deal of time among Northern Ireland Protestants, I am constantly horrified by the sheer scale of the ignorance of British and Irish officials and politicians about the majority of those people whose lives they attempt to control.
Of course, when you think about it, it's not surprising. Because Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom and was alleged by our Constitution to belong to us, neither government thought it appropriate to have diplomats operating as they would in a foreign country, yet foreign is the right description of this little backwater that got caught in a time warp. (And before someone writes in from the Department of Foreign Affairs about the roving representatives of the Anglo-Irish section, they were too few, they came too late and they were not encouraged to keep open minds.) Nor was there any electoral imperative to cause politicians here or in Westminster to bother finding out what was going on. How can Northern Ireland be considered a democracy when no one there can vote for any of the parties in either government? Fianna Fail left the field to Sinn Fein, while in Britain the pretence is maintained that the SDLP, an old-fashioned Catholic nationalist party, is a natural home for Labour voters. Indeed if you live in Northern Ireland you are banned from joining the British Labour Party.
With a very few exceptions, Irish politicians took the line that although the British government was to cherish both communities equally, the well-being of nationalists was Dublin's only concern. For decades, Irish policy on Northern Ireland was dictated by nationalist tribal chieftains - first Hume, now Adams. While refusing to honour the spirit of the Belfast Agreement and let out the killers of Garda McCabe, the Irish Government has fought to have the RUC disbanded at the behest of those who murdered hundreds of its officers and who want an emasculated police force so that the bandits of south Armagh can go about their daily smuggling and extortion without challenge. And now, as a result of leaks, rumour and the conduct of Sinn Fein ministers visa-vis the flag of the country which pays their salaries, Mr and Mrs Prod are not unreasonably convinced that Dublin is colluding with Sinn Fein to destroy every visible manifestation of their culture.
At Drumcree, people who have never had as much as a parking ticket told me over and over that only violence paid. In and around the Shankill Road, I saw an unloved and alienated community who see treachery every day in the stream of British concessions on parades, flags, anthems and symbols.
In the worst of housing estates in the South and in republican areas in the North, teenagers know themselves to be Irish: in the loyalist equivalents, the young think that tomorrow they may be told they are no longer British. The fierce individuality of the Protestant dissenting tradition is inimical to unity against the republican enemy; and the main hope of work, status and excitement is offered by gangsters.
Release into that world a man of the energy, ruthlessness and charisma of the legendary Johnny Adair, and what do you expect? Though his primary aim is to annihilate loyalist competitors and corner the drug trade, he genuinely worships the memory of Billy Wright and seeks to achieve a similar standing in the pantheon of loyalist heroes. As the outward signs of the culture in which loyalist children were reared is remorselessly stripped away, is it any wonder that marching behind the flag of the Ulster Freedom Fighters offers a sense of belonging?