While overt sectarian violence is increasingly rare, tensions are still high enough that officials built a new separation wall just weeks ago — adding to the dozens of walls and fences, some of them brick, corrugated-metal and steel-mesh structures more than 25 feet high, that already separate Protestant and Catholic communities
March 9, 2008 8:12 am Northern IrelandBELFAST — The two young men, in their teens or early 20s, one of them with fresh bruises on his face, walked up the Shankill Road on a busy Friday afternoon in January, carrying placards that read, “I’m a thief and a burglar.”
For an hour, people poured out of shops and pubs to watch the young men, who had been caught breaking into an elderly woman’s house. It had been a while since they had seen what is known here as a “walk of shame,” the kind of rough justice doled out by illegal paramilitary groups during Northern Ireland’s three decades of sectarian violence.
“I would love the paramilitaries to come back,” said Julie Lester, 42, who described watching with delight as the housebreakers were publicly humiliated. “There’s a rise in crime and drugs and we have nobody to turn to. I have really no faith in the police.”
Nearly 10 years after the landmark April 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, Northern Ireland is still struggling to create a police force fully trusted by the province’s divided Catholic and Protestant communities.