It may be a tiny blessing that Daniel McColgan was probably bleary-eyed and drowsy as he arrived for work at the postal sorting office in the Rathcoole estate on the outskirts of north Belfast shortly before six o'clock last Saturday morning,,writes Fintan O'Toole.
Not only was the hour ungodly, but he had been working as a DJ at a well-known Belfast night-spot just a few hours earlier.
It's not likely that he paid any attention to the green Renault parked nearby or to the two men in dark clothes with scarves covering their faces, apparently against the cold. He probably wouldn't have had much time to think before the bullets hit him.
And if he did, what could he have thought about? He was 13 years old when the republican and loyalist ceasefires came into effect in 1994. He went to an integrated school.
He must have grown into adulthood with a sense of possibility, a feeling that things were getting better. Life can't have been all that easy, with shift work, a young baby and the need to travel every day into an area in which the UDA is especially active.
But the chances of leading a decent life in a stable community must have seemed good.
Everybody - US presidents, Irish taoisigh, UK prime ministers, the EU, the UN - was telling him so. How, if he had a few infinitely long seconds between the realisation that he was about to die and the impact of the bullets of his weary body, could he have made any sense of the mockery of that promise by the events that have been going on around him in the last few months?
Making sense, of course, is not important for the now-dominant elements in the UDA who were looking for a soft target. Even by its own vicious sectarian logic, the UDA/UFF in Rathcoole is notoriously careless about who it kills. Apart from the young Catholic, Gary Moore, who was murdered in December 2000 while he was working for the Housing Executive, its other recent victims have been Protestants: UVF man Mark Quail, who was shot dead during the loyalist feud; Trevor Lowry, who was beaten to death by the UFF after he was mistaken for a Catholic; and Gavin Brett, who was shot dead by the UFF as he stood with Catholic friends on the Hightown Road.
ACCORDING to the Irish News, the UFF leader in Rathcoole "is said to rule with such extreme force that even a number of his own unit have asked to be allowed to transfer to other UDA areas because of his notorious attacks on his own men".
Looking for political logic from such a source may be entirely pointless. The more important question is why such a man, and the other UDA figures who have been carrying on a concerted terror campaign in north Belfast, are still at large.
Yet there is a political dimension to the murder of Daniel McColgan, and it needs to be addressed. The ambiguities of the peace process are especially uncomfortable here, for it is widely believed that the man who ordered the murder is well known to the likes of Gen John de Chastelain's international decommissioning body. The blurring at the edges of basic morality that has been a necessary part of the whole process is at its most dizzyingly dangerous in this kind of sickening entanglement.
More broadly, the great weakness of the Belfast Agreement - the way it institutionalises sectarianism - is being exposed on the streets of north Belfast.
Almost more depressing than the savage assaults on schools last week was the inability of local politicians and community leaders to blame anyone but the other side.
The instant narratives that were whipped up on both sides confirmed completely Dr Peter Shirlow's recent conclusions from his research into attitudes in so-called interface communities: "People cannot see themselves as perpetrators of violence and intimidation, only as victims of the opposite camp."
For all its genuine greatness, the peace process has tended to give universal currency to this sense of victimhood. Its language of "two traditions" has been made manifest on the ground by increasing segregation in urban working-class areas.
The population movements in Belfast are telling. After the 1994 ceasefire, three thousand people moved into areas dominated by the other religion. By 1996, six thousand families had moved back into areas dominated by their own religion.
GIVEN the chance, in other words, people don't want to be physically corralled into a "tradition". What keeps them there is fear. Many don't want to be politically corralled either: the latest research has confirmed yet again that a third of Catholics and a quarter of Protestants describe themselves as neither nationalist nor unionist. Yet the political system in this regard has the same effect as the sectarian killers: it locks people into sectarian ghettoes.
Part of the response to the fascistic bigots who killed Daniel McColgan must be a policing and security one.
But part of it must be a determination, in both parts of the island, to work against the sectarian grain of dividing both physical and political space between two tribes.
Insofar as it refuses to acknowledge the vital third tradition on this island - that of "none of the above" - the process colludes with the gangsters who draw their borderlines in human blood.
fotoole@irish-times.ie