In Glenarm, a small predominantly Protestant and beautiful village in north Antrim, loyalists have clambered onto the roof of the Catholic church and painted the letters, UVF.
In a plaintive effort to cloak the unmistakable message to the village's minority population, someone else has gone onto the roof and attempted to alter the lettering to read 'LOVE'.
The sectarianism that underpins so many facets of life in the North has exposed its shocking depths once again in north Belfast but it lurks, low-level, even in the tranquillity of a seaside village by the Glens of Antrim.
As Father Aidan Troy, chairman of the Holy Cross School board of governors and a constant presence among his flock, struggled last week to rebuild the shattered agreement that would allow Catholic girls to return to class, he suggested that the world is now looking at an x-ray of the North.
A little more of the disease of sectarian hatred is exposed each day and particularly yesterday when a 20-year-old Catholic postal worker was murdered by loyalists.
In the parallel universe of the Peace Process, Fr Troy went to the Northern Ireland Police Service last Tuesday to discuss his fears at the tensions rising again on the Ardoyne Road. The previous day, he had gone to see a Catholic parent who showed him severe bruising on his shoulder sustained while taking his daughter to Holy Cross school earlier. The man told him he had been badly jostled and his story was just one of several suggesting a return to the mood that created the 12 weeks of loyalist protests up to November 23 last.
"It had been brewing for days," the priest said. "It was concerted. Parents were being told to get off the road and were being bumped into. Finally, a woman was struck on Wednesday. When the rioting breaks out, one side gets in as heavily as the other, but the parents at Holy Cross were genuinely trying to go up and down to the school with the minimum of fuss.
"Honest to God, I never saw a group of people so glad to get back to normality as when an agreement was reached last year."
He now fears -- as do many nationalists in Belfast -- that behind the re-eruption of the dispute at Holy Cross lies a UDA plot to close not just this Catholic school but others as well. Hence the attack on Thursday on Our Lady of Mercy Catholic school in the heart of loyalist Ballysillan -- and the presence of an unmasked gunman.
Men with iron bars ran amok in the car park, smashing teachers' cars and terrifying the children.
Republican sources, however, suggest that the plot extends far beyond the closure of Catholic schools to an effort by the paramilitary group to force the IRA back into military action, and the disintegration of the Good Friday Agreement itself.
The republican leadership may maintain control, but sources report that "massive anger" has hardened among grassroots. There is now total cynicism at a statement from the UDA's North Belfast brigade ten days ago denying orchestrating violence around the Limestone Road area -- about a mile from Holy Cross -- and declaring its members would patrol the streets to ensure peace prevailed.
The UDA, a highly dangerous mix of sectarian politics and criminality, said that community representatives should sit down to talk.
But as far as Patricia Farren and her five children are concerned, the communique mattered little. Within a day, one of the largest pipe bombs seen in the city was sent hurtling through the window of their home on Manor Street in North Belfast, by the Red Hand Defenders -- a useful cover name for the UDA.
The pipe bomb exploded, blowing a crater in the floor of her house and spewing the walls with red-hot fuel. The next day, a Catholic father of five, Joe Murphy, was attacked at random and repeatedly stabbed in the head.
In another incident since the statement, a prison officer from Ballygomartin was targeted by the Red Hand Defenders on the basis that Gary Smyth, a companion of the notorious Johnny Adair, was being put upon in Maghaberry Prison by the authorities.
These strikes are now statistics in the long and detailed catalogue of sectarian and hate-driven incidents documented from all over the North by the Pat Finucane Centre in Derry.
Shane O'Currie, who collects the mass of material on a daily basis from the police, the media, local community groups and individuals, said that, even allowing for improved logging systems, there has been a "massive increase" since 2000 in the number of attacks. They are, in the main, effected against Catholics.
Up to last year, the centre logged an average of two pages of incidents per month. By last July, that had increased to eight pages weekly.
The onslaughts are concentrated in North Belfast, Co Antrim, North Derry and the Portadown/Lurgan area. So common are sectarian attacks at this stage, that the victims frequently do not even report them to the police unless they have actually suffered significant physical hurt. Some of the incidents detailed to police are not reported to the media or are not designated sectarian.
"If you are serious about tackling sectarianism, you need to have proper criteria for defining such attacks," said O'Currie.
"The criteria we use for inclusion is based on the model adopted by the Commission for Racial Equality in Britain. This said that if a person or organisation feels that the motivation for an attack against them is sectarian (or racist or homophobic), then it should be regarded as such.
The victim defines the attack. Then you don't get into disputes about whether it was or whether it wasn't sectarian," O'Currie said.
While the international media crowded into Belfast to record the classic spectacle of sectarianism when hosts of loyalist residents abused the schoolgirls of Holy Cross, other bigotry-driven events were occurring daily. On October 1 last, loyalists armed with bottles, nail-studded sticks and a spade attacked a group of up to 40 Catholic school children waiting for a bus to school at the Duncairn Gardens interface in North Belfast. Vandals smashed more than 70 windows at Ballygolan Primary School on the same day in North Belfast.
Four days later in Derry, a car driven by a Protestant community worker, Jeanette Wharke, was stoned by nationalist youths. On October 6, a Catholic taxi driver was lured into the Mourneview estate in Lurgan on a bogus fare and set upon by masked men armed with a pipe bomb.
Vividly illustrating the divisions racking the North's society, nationalists and loyalists that day welcomed the announcement of plans to build a "peace barrier" between Glenbryn Park and Alliance Avenue -- adjacent to the scene of the Holy Cross school.
The list goes on and on. Pick any day. October 13; a 21-year-old Catholic man escaped an abduction attempt by a car full of loyalists on the Cliftonville Road, North Belfast. He was beaten about the head with a hammer. October 17; a new and deadlier type of pipe bomb was used in an attack on a house in Alliance Avenue.
October 21: an eight-year-old Protestant boy needed eight stitches to his face after he was attacked with a piece of slate by older boys from the nationalist Oldpark area. October 23; a 17-year-old Catholic girl from Carrickhill North Belfast suffered a fractured skull when struck by a brick thrown from a car; the occupant called out "fenian scum" as he drove off.
November 1; The Irish News reported that over 100 families had been forced to move house because of intimidation since last April and had applied to the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) to have their homes bought. A further 64 families had been put on the Housing Executive's waiting list.
After 12 weeks, the protest at Holy Cross School was lifted but sectarian attacks continued unabated. Statistics from early November published in the North Belfast News showed that over 170 pipe bombs had been thrown in the north of the city since May.
On November 11, the full destructive force of these weapons was felt when 16-year-old Glen Branagh, a protestant from Tiger Bay, died from injuries sustained when a pipe bomb he was throwing exploded prematurely in his hand.
On the same day, a physically disabled Catholic boy was beaten unconscious as he tried to stop a gang assaulting his younger brother in Limavady, Co Derry. On November 16, a Catholic building worker narrowly escaped death when gunmen opened fire on him as he waited for a lift to work in Clady, Co Antrim.
December came, Christmas approached and still the attacks persisted. On December 2, loyalists were blamed for mowing down a man in Spamount Street, north Belfast.
The next day, Catholic Frankie Mulholland was shot dead by the Red Hand Defenders while sitting in a jeep on the Crumlin Road. Not far away, on Hillman Street, two Catholic teenagers narrowly escaped injury in a pipe bomb attack.
In Stormont, ministers launched a stg£200,000 project to tackle social problems in communities affected by sectarian problems in the north of the city. On December 11, Catholic residents of Newington Avenue welcomed the erection of a 30-foot-high securing fence at the rear of their homes; the previous one was inadequate, standing at just 14 feet.
After studying the pattern of attacks for many months now, O'Currie reports that the incidents abated somewhat over Christmas. Given that a second Protestant teenager, William Campbell, died on Friday week last after a pipe bomb he was handling exploded in his face in Coleraine, Co Derry, there is no confidence, however, that this lull will continue.
The murder of a Catholic postal worker yesterday combined with Red Hand Defenders threat to treat Catholic teachers as `legitimate targets' from tomorrow has quelled any hope that the North can emerge from its constant state of sectarian stress -- irrespective of the Good Friday Agreement.
Copyright © 2000 Sunday Business Post, Ireland