Liam Cairns sits in a wheelchair, a metal apparatus bolted to his skull. This halo brace was fitted to prevent him being crippled, but his mother Angela admits her 19-year-old son is no saint. There have been times in the past when she begged a solicitor to have him "put away" for stealing and other activities the IRA describe as "anti-social". On May 7th he was punished in a more permanent way.
The family home in north Belfast's nationalist Ardoyne is packed with seven of the Cairnses' 10 children, a few grandchildren and friends. They sit all around Liam, some on the single bed brought down to the sitting room for him, listening closely as he describes the night masked men came for him at the house where he was babysitting for his sister.
"They told me to get down on the ground, gave me a kick in the neck and put a hood on my head and tied my arms behind my back with a cord. I didn't know what was going on, they said nothing about why they were doing it to me, just `keep your head down'. They said to my older brother, Anthony, `if you want to see your brother alive again don't call the peelers' . . . it was just after 2 a.m., I remember because I was watching TV and there wasn't much on."
Three cars were waiting outside and Liam was bundled into one and taken to grounds at the back of a nearby youth club.
The men pushed him into a corner with his face to the ground. "I thought they would let me go, I thought they were just going to scare me so that I would say things that I had done. "Then they started hitting me on my legs and my arm . . . they pulled my legs through the railings, hitting them from the sides, I could hear them saying `do it again, again, again' . . . when they took off my gutties (trainers), I thought it was an ambulance man doing it. I thought it was over, I said something like `get me into an ambulance', and one of them laughed and it started again."
The beating left him with two broken legs, a broken arm that he cannot straighten, broken bones in his neck and a collapsed lung. Because the bones were so badly broken, medal rods and plates were put into his legs. All over his body there are puncture wounds made by a pick-axe, iron bars and baseball bats into which nails had been hammered.
If it wasn't for the no-smoking house rule in a family home nearby it is likely that Liam's body, covered by bags of rubbish, would have been discovered much too late. The girl who found Liam had gone outside for a cigarette in the early hours of the morning and spotted his discarded Nike trainers (visible because of a fluorescent strip) and heard his moans.
In the ambulance Liam drifted in and out of consciousness. He was bleeding heavily and found it hard to breathe. At the Royal Victoria Hospital he was in critical condition and was given last rites. Two weeks ago he went home and a spine expert from England is to assess when the halo brace can be safely removed. Doctors can't say for sure if he will ever walk properly.
"He lost six pints of blood, that alone could have killed him, it was a death beating," Angela says. When she still didn't know if her son would live or die, two local members of the republican movement called to the house. A Sinn Fein statement said there was nothing to indicate republicans were behind the attack.
"They sat in that chair and tried to reassure me that these people were not from the republican movement. Now I have been in the Troubles since 1969 and I didn't come down in the last shower . . . I don't believe them." Four members of Angela's family died during the Troubles, including a younger brother and her sister, Isabel Leyland, who was visiting Belfast from England in 1992 when she was shot during an IRA attack on the British army. At the time, Angela says, the IRA visited her family to say it had been a tragic accident.
There are get-well cards taped to the wall in the sitting room, and a photograph of a smiling Liam, before the beating, on the TV. "I have had phone calls from people in Pittsburgh, Washington, San Francisco, Holland, Scotland asking about Liam . . . But Gerry Kelly (Sinn Fein Assembly member) didn't lift up the phone and spend 10p to ask how my dying son was doing," she says. "I have never had any contact with Sinn Fein about it, and I wouldn't speak to any in this district. Blatant lies, blatant lies. I'm around too long to believe them when they say they didn't sanction it."
If the punishment beatings are kept up, "they will have a district full of kids going about in wheelchairs, the youth of Ardoyne and every nationalist area is going to be disabled," she says. "Bobby Sands said our revenge will be our children's laughter, but I don't hear any children laughing."
"I hate this place, how can you make something of yourself in a place like this?" asks Liam's sister, Francine, who has been listening while holding one of her children on her knee. "I don't want my kids growing up being beaten up."
"Of course I did stuff," says Liam. His mother says he "let himself be carried in stolen cars". "But I didn't do bad enough things to end up like this . . . I wouldn't like it happen to anyone else, I'd rather have the RUC get me than them ones."
Asked if he was worried about speaking out, Liam's father, George, says, "You have to be careful what you say". "Aaaaah, no," says Angela, annoyed. "We don't have to be careful . . . if they take one of them they will have to take me, and if I'm ever took away it will only be because I am speaking the truth.
"What they are trying to do is rule us by fear but I'm here to tell them we are not afraid of them and we never will be."