What is a normal murder? When does a normal murder become abnormal? Today's peace talks in Dublin will be full of people as expert on the details and nuances of last week's Belfast murders as coroners or cop-show writers.
Lots of drug dealers got shot in the world last week. It is a rough trade. But when it happens in Northern Ireland it reverberates. It is difficult to have a normal, Republic-type murder north of the Border.
One of the men shot dead last week was shot, and the 19-year-old woman with him was seriously wounded, just a few minutes down the Lisburn Road from me. I'd say it was about the same distance away as the spot where the man known as the General was murdered is from the house where I lived in Dublin.
The ambience was much the same: the General's car ran into an ordinary bit of suburban railings when he was shot at the wheel on his way to return a video.
The drug-dealer "Bap" Campbell was shot as he went to get into his luxury car, a few yards from the restaurant where the couple had been eating, in an ordinary suburban south Belfast street. The tape that marked off the murder scene was strung between neat little bay trees in terracotta pots such as you get outside florist shops. I knew who the General was. Everyone did. Another house I'd lived in, had even overlooked a house he frequented, and a garda had once wanted to use my bedroom for surveillance.
I drank in the same pub as the General's friends. I knew more than had ever been published about his activities, because I knew people in the legal profession who knew him or knew policemen who knew him.
I didn't know who exactly had killed him, but I took it for granted that even if it was people called "politicals" it was a criminal act, done by criminals in the pursuit of power and money. I took for granted also that the gardai knew who did it, and that when and if they had the evidence they'd charge someone.
There may be question-marks over some of these statements; but on the whole, if a foreign radio station, say, had rung me up and asked me to do a piece about the General and his death, I'd have known how to set about it with some confidence. And above all, what I might have said would have reflected a consensus.
In Belfast, the different thing about Brendan Campbell's death was that no one talked about it. In Ranelagh, after the General was killed, you could hardly buy a pound of tomatoes without joining a seminar on it. In the neighbourhood shops in Belfast, which I went around the next morning on purpose, the usual polite nothings were being exchanged.
I'd encountered the same silence the week before, when the security forces came with their creepy-crawly thing to blow up two stolen cars that had been left in the next street. A little crowd stood on the corner watching the remote-control thing inch along. Nobody spoke. Not at all.
The first words actually said to me about Brendan Campbell's death were political, a sneer. "How come there's no whinge out of the nationalists now?" an acquaintance asked. "If it was one of their own that was shot that near an RUC station, we'd never hear the end of it about police collusion."
The next thing was an overheard remark, also, I suppose, political: "Did you notice the address of that girl who was with him?" I heard an insider say. "She must have been a Protestant."
The only conversation I managed to have about it was with a unionist friend. "If the IRA did it I suppose Sinn Fein will have to go," I said. "That'll teach them to be careful about getting other parties thrown out. Maybe they shouldn't have gone so hard on the UDP when the Catholics were being murdered."
"There's no comparison," my friend said, outraged. "There's no comparison between slaughtering innocent Catholics for purely sectarian motives and killing one single criminal type who by all accounts is absolutely no loss to society."
I felt the immediate slide to the relativisation of murder. I was about to start arguing that to lose your life is to lose your life and that murder is always and everywhere murder and mustn't become personalised. Then I realised that it is too late for that argument in a place where so many ordinary people are connected either with murderers or victims or both, and almost nobody inhabits a judicious middle ground.
And also, abstract ideals may be right - abstract justice, abstract rule-keeping, an abstractly even-handed application of the Mitchell Principles. But the ideal isn't going to be as effective in moving things on as an intelligent corruption of the ideal.
These considerations don't apply to an ordinary Dublin murder. But there are some similarities. Ask people in Dublin's inner city and they'd say we should shoot drug dealers ourselves. If the IRA shot nine alleged drug dealers in the North in the last year or so, that policy is no doubt making the IRA very popular.
Very, very disadvantaged enclaves in Northern Ireland are drug-free at the moment compared with parts of Dublin, Rome, New York, The Hague . . . Paradoxically, the more peace there is, the more of a threat from drugs. Crack cocaine has been seized in Derry and Ballymena.
Exactly as in Dublin, the police force cannot tolerate an organisation of parallel enforcers. But not as in Dublin, the enforcers of the IRA may have better intelligence about drug-dealing, and better access to nationalist, so-to-speak, drug dealers than the police can have.
Above all, not as in Dublin, the police are not only involved in this fundamental conflict about who delivers the community to a law and order itself problematic, but are gatekeepers of the whole diplomatic process.
What the police say about the murder of "Bap" Campbell has some of the same implications as what gardai said about the General. But it is also at the very centre of politics.
If, therefore, there were a conversation in the newsagents or the dry-cleaners about the dead man outside the restaurant, it wouldn't get very far without the participants revealing their hands. The most anodyne things that might be said, and would be said by a murmuring crowd in Dublin - "He was asking for it," or "All the same, a little child is left without its father," or "It was right under the noses of the police, wasn't it?" - are all unsayable. Or, at least, you can say whatever it is you think only to people you know already think like you.
The pressure to speak without saying anything leads in two directions. If you're a relatively genteel person, you become a world expert on the polite nothings of my neighbourhood. If you're not genteel, you might crack a joke.
Or you could coin a slogan. "Bap" Campbell himself, and his murderers, and anyone exploiting his murder, are all effectively going along with a memorable one I saw on the Shankill Road last week. "Shove your Doves," it said.