Ireland's heart of darkness

The raw bitterness of the Protestant attacks on Catholic children on their way to school draws on a vile legacy of hate and fear, as David McKittrick reports.

The girls of Holy Cross primary school in the Ardoyne area of North Belfast are not the first 4- and 5-year-olds to have been thrust into the front line of Northern Ireland's long-simmering conflict.

Of all the places that have been scarred by the Troubles, North Belfast is the most violent, with well over 500 deaths. Many a child has been splashed with the blood of its dying father after gunmen burst into its house and opened fire. Others have been on the streets while the Army and IRA fought gun battles. Some have been caught in crossfire; others have lost fathers or brothers. Even here, however, the violence is concentrated in a few areas, notably Ardoyne.

When children are out playing in the evenings, on their bicycles and their pink roller skates, parts of Catholic Ardoyne can look reasonably normal. But then the glimpse of a 8m-high metal peace line serves as a reminder that on the other side of it is a hostile Protestant presence.

Even more striking is the sight, on the wall of an Ardoyne Sinn Fein office, of a long list of IRA members and civilians killed in the immediate vicinity. The wall does not, naturally enough, list those who have been victims of the IRA, but it gives a sense of how many members this community feels it has lost.

There are more than 120 names on the list, ranging from IRA members to old ladies killed by stray bullets during gun battles. This is a compact area: if a cross were set out at the scene of every death, the place would look like a war cemetery.

The Catholic parents and the protesting Protestants who are involved in the present dispute have all lived through three decades of conflict. They all grew up with troops on the streets, with violent deaths, with social deprivation, high unemployment and general alienation.

They, too, were children who were exposed to repulsive violence. Some have coped with this extraordinarily well, but others have built up reservoirs of searing hatred. In the Ardoyne confrontation this is particularly evident on the Protestant side, where such inarticulate rage has given rise to behaviour that has shocked the world.

Beneath the bigotry lies an intense loyalist feeling of loss and defeat. One part of Ardoyne Rd is bedecked with republican flags, while the other is smothered in red, white and blue and loyalist paramilitary emblems. Protestants can remember when there was far more red, white and blue and much less green, white and gold. Catholic Ardoyne then was a nervous ghetto, surrounded by a sea of orange; today it is expanding, brash, assertive and demanding its rights.

This helps to explain why many Catholic parents now insist that their daughters should go to their school by the front door, and not by the longer route that takes them to a more discreet, and indeed safer, side entrance. That route, they insist, means going back to accepting second-class citizenship.

Today, it is the loyalists who see themselves as an embattled minority, endangered by the growing Ardoyne. Many Protestants have moved away, so that those remaining describe themselves as 1000 Protestants facing 7000 Ardoyne Catholics.

The appalling behaviour of the protesters stems not just from bigotry, but from fear. The Catholics are taking over, they say; they are "getting in everywhere", they are forcing Protestants out. It is this sense that explains much of the violence in this and other parts of north Belfast over the summer. Yet although this is the key to this year's outbreaks, it is only one part of a mosaic of reasons for violence in the area.

A drive of a few hundred metres goes down the Crumlin Rd to another flank of Ardoyne, and to the exact point where the Troubles first flared in 1969.

An official report into that outbreak of violence concluded: "The classic communal pattern emerges starkly - the two communities exhibiting the same fears, the same distrust of lawful authority. Catholics and Protestants were haunted by the same ghosts."

The Shankill district, to the south, is a real mess. The grimy remains of July bonfires are still scattered around, and many cramped Victorian houses still survive in the side-streets. It is a demoralised district, much reduced in size, much of the fierce, old pride gone.

The fact that some loyalist paramilitary warlords have taken to large-scale drug-dealing has sapped communal morale even further. Vicious feuding between rival groups has resulted in more than a dozen deaths in recent years.

These lethal turf wars have subsided for the moment, but they led to local convulsions as people associated with the two main groups, the Ulster Defence Association and Ulster Volunteer Force, were forced to move home.

The Shankill streets are festooned with loyalist flags, but today their function has changed: now their primary purpose is to proclaim which streets are to be regarded as the property of the UDA, and as a tacit warning to the UVF to keep out.

Further along on the Antrim Rd, the scene becomes more middle class. This is a prosperous area, with leafy avenues and fine, big houses, some with splendid views over Belfast Lough.

But here, too, the story is one of Protestant flight, for the Protestant middle classes have almost entirely upped and left, decamping to satellite towns such as Carrickfergus in County Antrim.

There were no violent clashes, no ugly scenes in the streets: the Protestants simply collectively decided they did not like the way the neighbourhood was going. Their homes are now occupied by upwardly mobile Catholics.

A few kilometres further out, the Antrim Rd reaches the suburb of Glengormley. Catholic expansion has reached it, too, leading to violence there in patterns that can be traced with depressing precision.

It was a Protestant area, but the appearance of Catholic schools and various other premises began to change things. In 1975 a workman named Gerald Alphonsus De'ath was helping to build a Catholic school in High Town Rd when he picked up a vacuum flask. It was booby-trapped and exploded, killing him instantly.

Just a month ago loyalists shot dead, close to the school, Gavin Brett, a Protestant teenager they mistakenly believed was a Catholic. Many Catholics live in Glengormley now, and more are moving in: the gunmen were expressing rage at this, and trying to stop the influx.

Such murders do not work, since although they cause much human misery, they never reverse the religious trends. The growth of the north Belfast Catholics, and the draining away of Protestants, is irreversible.

The Shore Rd is almost the last sizeable section of north Belfast under Protestant control. There is a great deal of loyalist graffiti, with stretches of kerbstones hundreds of metres long painstakingly painted red, white and blue.

These people see themselves as having their backs to the wall. Their politicians have delivered little or nothing to them, they feel; the peace process is just one-way traffic, benefiting only the republicans and the nationalists.

Their sense of loss is palpable, and so, too, is their sense of bafflement about what to do about it. Protestant-dominated Ulster is largely gone, certainly in north Belfast, and those diehards who refuse to move out think of themselves making a last stand, as in the Alamo.

Their problem is that they are prepared to resort, as they have at Holy Cross school, to methods that are almost guaranteed to repel the rest of the world, rather than to gain its sympathy.

After 30 years of the Troubles, they have yet to learn this lesson, and it is too late to learn it now. They are a lost people, mourning their lost status and their lost territory, and fighting for what looks increasingly like a lost cause.

- INDEPENDENT