Twenty-two young faces stare out from the photograph on the walls of St Enda's GAA clubhouse in north Belfast. Some are smiling proudly, others are a little more reticent and uncertain. The picture was taken in January 1975 to mark the team winning the local under-12 championship. St Enda's was a young club then and had not won much, so someone decided to capture the moment for posterity.

There is nothing unusual in any of this. But the experiences of St Enda's GAA club over the past 30 years have been anything but usual or normal and this is a photograph very much set apart.

The roll-call printed underneath is the first graphic reflection of that. The names of Liam Canning and Gerry Devlin, both standing at either end of the back row, are followed by three stark capital letters - RIP. Both men died violently during the Troubles in the years after this photograph was taken. Another member of the team was lucky to survive a gun attack.

Liam, Gerry and the other members of St Enda's whose lives have been blighted by the violence of the past three decades were remembered and celebrated at the club's ground last Monday afternoon. On the first sunny day of the summer, men, women and children from all around St Enda's catchment area of Glengormley turned up in their droves for an afternoon filled with traditional music, icecream cones and hurling and football matches from under-12 level right up to senior.

The centrepiece was a competition between the football clubs of north Belfast for the Sean Fox Memorial Shield. The 72-year-old Sean Fox had also died violently, shot dead in his home a few hundred yards from the club in October 1993. He was honorary president of St Enda's when he was killed. He also regularly held Irish classes for club members eager to learn the language.

Almost seven years later they were still telling stories about Sean Fox in the early May sunshine. Like the time back in the 1980s when there was a ceremony at the old clubhouse.

At the appointed time, as the Tricolour was being hoisted up the flagpole, Sean gave the signal to the man operating the PA system to start the national anthem. A few seconds of uneasy silence followed and when it became clear that there was to be no music Sean proceeded, totally unfazed, to belt out the anthem himself.

Within half an hour an RUC patrol arrived and ordered that the flag be taken down because there had been complaints from local residents that, together with the singing, it was causing offence. These were trying and difficult times to be active in the GAA in north Belfast.

The murders of Liam Canning, Gerry Devlin and Sean Fox are only the most outwardly vivid representations of the sustained attack under which St Enda's found itself.

Interspersed between those killings were attempted bombings and shootings and numerous arson attacks on its premises. Nobody is sure of the precise number but a conservative estimate is that the club has been targeted at least 16 times. Part of the problem has been its location.

Unlike in west Belfast where GAA clubs were situated in the heart of recognisably Catholic areas, the lines have never been as tightly drawn in the north of the city. Loyalist and nationalist areas sit cheek by jowl with one another and tension was all but inevitable.

The GAA was also a relatively recent cultural phenomenon in the area and was interpreted by some as a threat. The St Enda's club was formed in the 1950s, predominantly by men from other areas recently settled in the new suburb of Glengormley.

At that time Glengormley was right on the edge of the city. The land they managed to secure for the pitch served their purposes but it was also dangerously exposed and isolated at the end of a dark laneway. This made it an easy target for sectarian attacks and left those working in and around the club late at night extremely vulnerable.

The men who shot Gerry Devlin in December 1997 were well aware of this. He had arrived just before 11 p.m. on a Friday night to collect his brother and, although people coming out of the club gave chase after the shooting, the gunmen had already escaped into the darkness.

As with Sean Fox, the killing was a punishing blow to St Enda's because Gerry had also been a pivotal figure at the club. He was in charge of the senior football team when he died. If the dynamic driving the murders of Sean Fox and Gerry Devlin was to strike right at the heart of the GAA club, then those involved certainly succeeded.

The days after Gerry Devlin's murder were gloomy and hesitant. The palpable feeling was that the entire club was under threat and pure fear kept members away for months afterwards. But, inch by inch, normality crept closer. A new clubhouse had been all but completed when Gerry died and it was officially opened by the then president of the GAA, Joe McDonagh, the following May.

McDonagh's visit was important to the club as it went some way towards allaying concerns that it was becoming increasingly isolated within the GAA community. The passing of time and the political changes have improved life for the members of St Enda's. With the ceasefires, indiscriminate attack has receded.

The new clubhouse has established the club at the heart of the local community and with housing developments cropping up all around the surrounding area there is a new generation of footballers and hurlers on the way.

Inevitably, there is still a hangover from all that has gone before, but increasingly the club is finding itself addressing the same difficulties as everyone else in the GAA community - the fierce competition from other sports, getting volunteers to help with the underage teams - and in the circumstances they are welcome signs that the worst aspects of the past may be sliding from view.

But nobody ever forgets. Members of the Devlin and Fox families were in the clubhouse on Monday afternoon to lend their support and their connection with St Enda's endures.

Outside, the club's juvenile hurlers were engrossed in a game. As they pulled, blocked and hooked with youthful enthusiasm you couldn't help feeling Gerry and Sean would have approved.