A pair of spectacles, an empty mailbag and a pool of blood were for several hours the only visible signs of the brutal early-morning murder of Daniel McColgan on the northern outskirts of Belfast. He succumbed to seven bullets at close range as he arrived for his round last Saturday.
This was no clean assassination: all the signs suggest the two masked gunmen fired again and again in a frenzy of anti-Catholicism.
Younger looking even than his 20 years, Daniel McColgan's face has stared out from every newspaper for days in Northern Ireland. He is the 14th postman to die in the Troubles, making that the most dangerous civilian job after taxi-driver and bus-driver. For many, Daniel's death evokes memories of the murder of Gavin Brett, an 18-year-old Protestant, gunned down in nearby Glengormley by, many suspect, the same loyalist unit.
The predictable noises have emanated from the Northern Ireland Office about "evil men" being brought to justice and there being "no hiding place" for them, with four men so far being questioned. But this brings only cold comfort to nationalists. As the Irish News has revealed, just one conviction has been secured for the last 100 terrorist murders in Northern Ireland, three-quarters of which are thought to have been perpetrated by loyalists.
Figures such as these will add weight to Gerry Adams's argument that there is a marked reluctance on the part of the police force and the British security apparatus to confront the threat posed by the UDA under its UFF and Red Hand Defender cover names. This argument would have more validity if it were not for the fact that the conviction rate for loyalists over the last 30 years is considerably higher than for republicans.
Nevertheless, many nationalists will agree with Sinn Féin's analysis that the murder of Daniel McColgan is nothing more than the traditional Protestant response to changes perceived as benefiting Catholics. The republican movement's refusal, though, either to support a crackdown by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) or to bring out the IRA guns again makes it an analysis and no more. Unless the Northern Ireland Office and the PSNI can score some successes against the loyalist godfathers, the SDLP will be left looking not courageous but servile for taking their places on the Policing Board.
THE police's ability or otherwise to deal with these life and death issues will be the real criterion against which they will be judged, not the minutiae of accountability. In this context, unionists resent the focus of the Police Ombudsman's office and its (presumably unintentional) attempt to misconstrue the Omagh bomb inquiry and make it an argument for deracinating Special Branch.
Bishop Patrick Walsh delivering the homily at Daniel McColgan's requiem mass said Daniel was singled out "for one reason and one reason alone - that he was a Catholic". He was, said the Bishop, killed by men reared on a diet of sectarian hatred. Few doubt that the raw hatred of Catholics per se is a guiding passion for many within loyalism. But, alone, it is an insufficient explanation for what we are witnessing with horror in north Belfast.
The recent conflict appeals to many loyalists on a number of levels, as Richard Haass, George Bush's envoy, acknowledged in a highly nuanced speech last week. For a whole swathe of young working-class Protestants, rioting provides an exciting interlude in otherwise hopeless lives. Educational attainment in loyalist parts of north Belfast is woeful compared with that of Catholics. Economic prospects are correspondingly poor. Housing conditions are, arguably, worse in the Protestant areas. The relatively flourishing Catholic community is growing numerically while the Protestant community contracts. What many middle-class Protestants can rationalise as symbolic issues marginal to the constitutional position are seen by poor Protestants as erosion of their intrinsic identity.
THE Red Hand Defenders, whose threat to Catholic workers has now, thankfully, been condemned by the "mainstream" UFF, have now issued an order for their men to stand down. Rightly or wrongly, though, they and the increasingly anti-agreement UDA/UFF do have a political agenda of sorts and north Belfast Protestantism is a receptive audience. Already they have tempted the INLA out of total ceasefire mode. The mainstream Provisional IRA is the next target. The collapse of the Belfast Agreement is the ultimate goal.
Unfortunately for these extreme loyalist elements, their actions only play into the Provisional IRA's hands. It is heartening that the residents of Glenbryn - scene of the Holy Cross school protest - are realising this. It is a cultural fact that Protestants are virtually immune to leadership. The IRA, working with the grain of Catholic obedience, finds it comparatively easy to switch on and off rioting and its other provocation. It suits provisionalism rather well in the US for Northern Catholics to be seen as victims of a pogrom: no more questions about Colombia, less of a focus on the contradictions in their position post-September 11th.
Increasingly, as a recent attitude survey bore out, Northern society as a whole seems to be held hostage to these opposing paramilitary agendas. The challenge for mainstream politicians is to resist proposals which fail to pass the mutuality test. As we are seeing, nationalists do not really gain from gratuitous affronts to unionism if the civic fabric of society is made unbearable for everyone in the process.
email: king.uu@btinternet.com
Mary Holland is on leave