THE great historian ATQ Stewart, in The Narrow Ground, compared the violence in Belfast in 1970 to the 19th century crashing up through the cobbles.
Andrew Boyd wrote Holy War In Belfast before the violence started and it was published to meet huge enthusiastic demand, just as we were getting familiar with the sound of gunfire in the night.
What both books reminded us of was that sectarian division, such as was destroying the city, had torn Belfast apart before, indeed before most of us were born.
There was a pattern derived from old customs and fears. Which raises an awkward little question: what about the time in between? If Northern Ireland is a divided society prone to eruptions of sectarian violence, how come it has managed to be stable and relatively peaceful for most of its history?
If there are forces to tear it apart, what holds it together and subdues those forces for decades at a time?
The same question came up once when I was interviewing one of the Sinn Féin leaders, Mitchel McLaughlin, some years ago.
The parents of an angry generation had endured fifty years of one-party unionist rule before a mass movement took to the streets campaigning for change.
Even then, that mass movement had been small at the start and did not initially represent a groundswell of protest.
Mitchel and I discussed whether the generation before ours had been docile and complacent, had indeed neglected to assert its rights and allowed a problem to fester until it became unmanageable.
Even when you look at the gradual build-up of protest and violence you see that stabilising tendencies might have prevailed but for crucial moves, sometimes by small groups of people who might, in an alternative universe, have behaved differently.
On October 5 1968. a civil rights parade in Derry, of only a couple of hundred people, became a global news story because the police, under the direction of an alcoholic minister of Home Affairs, attacked it.
Throughout the period of the Troubles we see these peak moments which convulse the whole of society, and which might have worked out differently. Yet when they happen they seem to remind us that conditions are untenable.
“Oh yes,” we say, “that old business.”
There was Bloody Sunday when the British paratroopers massacred thirteen people in Derry. There was Bloody Friday when the IRA killed 9 people detonating nearly two dozen bombs in Belfast city centre on a working day.
And there were the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981, and the Drumcree protests by the Orange Order in 1996.
All of these and other events galvanised fear and anger across the whole of society, and yet all were initiated by small groups.
Those groups played on the vulnerability of a divided society. You can produce an irritation in the fault line and drive a wedge between communities and the state will be shaken to its foundations.
And that raises a question for the historians, like Stewart and Boyd, both long gone of course. Is the problem the fault line or is it the fanatical minority that delights in producing tremors in it with dramatic acts?
Or, phrased differently, is the problem the few bad people or is Northern Ireland just a sick society?
We might be living through an experiment to find out, for we are now still divided but are back into a prolonged period of relative peace which some few would like to bring crashing to an end.
In this phase the state is determined not to be the problem. Our current police service does not attack illegal parades and even handles the occasional riot with care, usually taking more injuries than it inflicts. It is conscious of the fault-line and the delicacy of the current political arrangements.
In Pahalgam in Kashmir last month a few men with guns were able to trigger a war between India and Pakistan. They murdered 26 tourists, and India avenged the dead by firing missiles at alleged terrorist bases in Pakistan.
If war was the goal of the gunmen then they were highly successful.
And if India and Pakistan know of no other way to respond to violence than with more violence, then people who strategise like those gunmen will know how to provoke these nuclear powers to lunge at each other’s necks.
I’m not saying that we have found a better way and can tell other fields of sectarian division how to stabilise.
The horrible truth is that - Ukraine aside - war in India/Pakistan and Gaza, as in Ireland in the past, has been triggered by small, armed groups of political activists who were able to shock whole nations into calamitous warfare.
The First World War was started by one assassin.
The Irish War of Independence started with Dan Breen and a few around him shooting police officers. The state has often obliged such irritants by over reacting.
Creative peace making would be finding different ways to react to violence than with revenge masquerading as defence.
As John Hume put it. We should not indulge in ‘the politics of the last atrocity’.
See More: Belfast, Northern Ireland, Troubles
