In Europe

her into town to buy new shoes for the wedding.
    Belfast is the city of fences: barbed wire around schools and neigh-bourhoods, armoured barriers around police stations, metre-high constructions around every clubhouse. Even the traffic lights are protected by iron screens. On Dublin Road, all niceties have been burned away by thirty years of war. Crumlin Road consists largely of burned-out shops and Protestant flags: the smaller the bay window, the bigger the flag. Only Wilton Funeral Directors is still in tip-top condition. The Good Friday Agreement, a historic ceasefire according to all concerned, has been inplace since April 1998. It was then, for the first time, that David Trimble's Unionists agreed to share power with Gerry Adams’ Sinn Féin. For the first time too, the IRA announced that the force of arms was to play no role in this new situation, in which ‘Irish republicans and Unionists will pursue our different political objectives as equals’.
    On Shankill Road, a group of about twenty men are marching through the quiet Sunday afternoon with their sashes, cockades and bowler hats. They parade along behind a British and an Irish flag, with two drummers and an accordionist out in front, behind them about a hundred grey, worn-out men. There is not a single young person to be seen.
    The evening news according to ITV Ulster on 30 October, 1999:
    Gerry Adams says that the peace process is in trouble again.
    Gerard Moyna of Belfast has been sentenced to seven years in prison after a Semtex bomb he was transporting through the city went off prematurely.
    Victor Barker, the father of a twelve-year-old boy killed in the Omagh bombing, wants the damages committee to pay back his son's tuition, all £30,000 of it. ‘After all, it's done us no good,’ Barker says.
    Preparations for Halloween have begun in Londonderry, ghosts look out of the windows, children run screaming down the darkened streets.
    The Reverend Clifford Peebles has been arrested; he believes that the Protestants of Northern Ireland are one of the last, lost tribes of Israel. He has been charged with possession of a home-made pipe bomb.
    The very first victim of the new Irish civil war was John Patrick Scullion, aged twenty-eight, a warehouse worker. On the evening of 27 May, 1966, as he was stumbling drunkenly down Falls Road in Belfast, he shouted at a passing car: ‘Up the republic, up the rebels!’ A little later he was shot and killed outside his door. His Protestant killers said later: ‘We had nothing against him. It was because he shouted “Up the rebels!”’
    The choice of Scullion as victim was typical of this civil war: he was not a militant, not a member of the IRA, he was simply an ordinary citizen who made the wrong gesture at the wrong place. The war has often been characterised as an explosion of sectarian violence, a seventeenth-century religious feud with a new look, in which many NorthernIrish took part passionately. In reality, it was the very opposite, right from the start.
    In 1968, when the new civil war broke out, the traditional Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods of Belfast intermingled, mixed marriages were becoming common, religious fanatics and sectarians were regarded as loonies. Sociological research between 1989–95 showed little prejudice among the older generations, in contrast with those who grew up after 1968. A good forty per cent of the Northern Irish surveyed said they wished to be associated with neither the Catholics nor the Protestants.
    What suddenly turned Northern Ireland into a war zone was therefore not latent, widespread religious tension, but the disastrous spiral of violence in which the IRA, the Protestant Unionists, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British troops became entangled.
    The revolt had begun in the 1960s as a moderate reaction to Protestant intimidation and discrimination. In 1967, a number of Catholics, inspired by the student protests elsewhere in Europe, set up the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Associaton (NICRA). Taking American civil rights activists as their model, they applied peaceful means at first: demonstrations, meetings, sit-ins. For those in power in Ulster, however, this was taking things too far. On 5 October, 1968, a NICRA march in Londonderry was broken up heavy-handedly by police; the demonstrators fought back with stones and Molotov cocktails. The maniacal Pope-hater, Reverend Ian Paisley, fueled the fires even further, his Ulster Protestant