1994 IRA ceasefire - 10 years on: 'It's like a miracle - I feel as if I have been reborn into an Ireland where there was never any trouble', one woman who has lived all her life in the nationalist Ardoyne area of Belfast told Kathy Sheridan.
It can be hard to be an optimist if all you expect from the hand of history is a punch.
Ask one working-class Ardoyne Catholic about 10 years of peace, and he draws a straight line from 1935 - when terrorised, defenceless Catholics "ran here for safety" - to the traumatised school girls of Holy Cross, 65 years on.
"What it proved," says Michael Liggett, of the Ardoyne Focus Group, "is that all this can happen at any time, that if you're a part of the Irish nationalist community, no-one will come and protect you."
What he sees is an Ardoyne still living behind 1.75 km of an 18 to 25 foot high "peace line", i.e. a towering, corrugated iron cage; of dismal unemployment figures, and poor education.
"If" there is prosperity, it is no credit to the government; "it was going to happen anyway". Fewer people may be getting killed and hurt and communications between the two communities may be "much" better, "but fear is still alive and well", he asserts.
And then there is Donna McNulty. In 1994, she was the 23-year-old mother of two infants in Ardoyne and for whom the news of the ceasefire was so wonderful "it didn't seem real". Her greatest hope was for "a better community life for the children. In the Troubles, they'd be out following the big lads, throwing stones and wrecking houses. . ."
And now? "It's still the same," she says glumly. "I don't think that much has changed." Really? She has a think. "Well, the kids are only out there for every march now; that's only two a year," she grins. Pause.
"And nobody's dying, no-one's being searched or stopped and asked where they're going." Another pause. "And there is more happening in Ardoyne - wee summer schemes, youth clubs."
She has a job too, in the supermarket. "Aye, and I love it," she says, adding that a lot of her friends are back in work. So life has improved, then? "It has. But I don't think that has anything to do with the ceasefire." Nothing?
She thinks again. "Well . . . Up to 10 years ago, I never thought I'd be working again, because I felt that I'd always be worrying about where the kids were and where a bomb was planted. And there wasn't really any work about anyway." She pauses again and smiles broadly: "Aye . . . When you think about it, a fair few things have changed."
The family is off to Spain next month, Donna's fourth year to take the trip. "We'd never have been able to go before." And her friends? "Everyone's away somewhere, it's all you hear about now," she laughs.
Christine McMullen, a soft-spoken woman with grown children, has lived and worked in Ardoyne all her life.
Although her family was "involved with nothing" - "nothing", she stresses - during the Troubles, their house was raided twice, brutally and humiliatingly, by the army.
After one raid, she suffered a miscarriage. "It implants a fear that never goes away . . . You had no protection," she says tremulously. But the past 10 years have transformed her world.
"It's like a miracle - I feel as if I have been reborn into an Ireland where there was never any trouble."
To her, the Holy Cross horrors - "with the army and the hatred that was brought out" - were simply a terrifying reminder of why there can be no going back.
But Michael Liggett is right about the fear. "I wouldn't dream of walking around the Mater Hospital area at midnight," Christine says. Because of muggers? "Because I might be recognised as a Catholic."
Another parent, while deeply proud of a child who has landed a good job in the civil service - "That wouldn't have been open to Catholics when I was young" - still asks to remain anonymous. "It's possible that some of the workmates don't even realise they're working with a Catholic . . ."
None of them mentions the controversial PSNI handling of a loyalist march through the area on July 12th. Or the punishment beatings that according to ex-Sinn Féin member, Colette Cassidy, may be linked to four young suicides around her street alone. And so it goes in this imperfect peace. As geographer, Peter Shirlow puts it, things are getting better but things are getting worse.
However it is articulated, the recurring issue is policing. Strip it down and for the ordinary citizen, what policing means is protection, a sense of personal security.
"The RUC protected the \ protesters in the Holy Cross dispute," says Cassidy, who resigned from Sinn Féin after a bomb exploded beside her and the little girl she was taking to the school and she felt the party was not hearing the people's voices.
Why were there no prosecutions? asks a man later, with a resigned shrug.
Father Aidan Troy, who shared the cauldron with his Holy Cross parishioners, says plainly that there is "that kind of hatred around the North. It's just so civilised in so many ways - unless it goes wrong".
Policing is the final piece in the jigsaw, he says. "The ultimate issue is how do we live together? How do we behave towards one another? And when we fail to behave, what are the sanctions?" For many nationalist families, even in the gravest situations, calling the police is simply not an option, he says. One middle-class Catholic draws a straight line from Drumcree '96 - when the loyalist march was forced down the Garvaghy Road - to this year's Twelfth march through Ardoyne. "Never underestimate the shock that first Drumcree was to middle-class Catholics," he says.
"Here was a huge sign that in all the talk about change and equality, when unionists applied pressure, the state caved in. That's what finally made Sinn Féin respectable. People were voting for protection."
And yet, says Father Troy, "there is now the wonderful freedom to phone the police Ombudsman's office and we have the Human Rights Commission, even if it hasn't grown as might have been hoped in 1998".
It is a long way, metaphorically, from Ardoyne to the Malone Road, the Dublin 4 of Belfast. Here, the modest Catholic church once known as the "maids' chapel" (for the Catholic servants of wealthy Protestants) has just been enlarged, emerging like a towering symbol of a Catholic ascendancy. Tales of a burgeoning Catholic middle-class have not been exaggerated. In the North, arguments rage about its genesis. Did the Catholics do it for themselves, using the only pathway - free education - available to them, along with the entrepreneurial nous honed by decades of employer and State discrimination? Or did they shamelessly exploit the British taxpayer, while bleating about imperialist oppression?
Or, asks John Cousins, a member of the Parades Commission and associate lecturer with the Open University Business School, did their erstwhile Protestant masters, feather-bedded by secure, well-paid jobs in the State sector to the point where they lost their entrepreneurial drive and failed to motivate their own working-class, sow the seeds of their own eclipse?
Cousins, the product of a large, working-class, Catholic family chased out of the hardline loyalist Taughmonagh estate in 1968, points out that he was among only three out of 500 children from that estate who made it to university.
Yet four out of his eight siblings wound up with degrees. "I was lucky that my parents believed in education." And so it continues.
Now, says Cousins, while 22 per cent of Catholic working-class males are making it to university, only 6 per cent of their Protestant peer group are. "The result is that a Catholic gets a good job in the civil service, a nice home, nice car - and the other side looks and says : 'That's not fair'." Analysis of the 4,000 Northern students who leave for British universities every year makes for even bleaker reading for the Protestant community.
Some 70 per cent of those who leave to study are Protestant. Of those, 70 per cent do not return.
It is hardly surprising then, that in the senior professions, Catholics are said to be in the majority, or soon will be. Or that among 10 of Northern Ireland's top businesses, eight are said to be owned by Catholics and the other two managed by Catholics.
So is all this sufficient to redress the ancient wrongs? "Oh, that's just economic power, that's what nationalists have taken to themselves," shrugs another middle-class Catholic. "Just look at all the bodies set up as a result of the Good Friday agreement; there isn't one northern Catholic at the head of them."
But as John Cousins notes, "the establishment changes slowly." Even at this glacial pace, however, some note a certain dilemma for the "Castle Catholics", the kind who used to blend in seamlessly with the ruling class and made a career of not rocking the boat.
"We're seeing a new breed of 'Castle Catholic'," says Cousins, "those who are now loudly expressing their apparently long-held republican credentials, while still clinging tightly to the coat-tails of the establishment."
So 10 years on, did the Catholics win?
"I don't think they'd say we've won," says Cousins, "I don't think there is a concept of winning, more one of wanting respect. . . The big job now is to build Protestant confidence in a new community, built in a shared space."