While some memorials to Northern Ireland's dead are left in peace, others are routinely desecrated showing that while the Troubles recede, a lot of unappeased hatred remains, writes Susan McKay.
The war may be over, but what is to be done about the dead? The North is a place still haunted by violence and there is no sign of agreement about how to let those who were killed in the Troubles rest in peace.
After Michael McIlveen (15) was killed in Ballymena, Co Antrim, last spring the wall against which he was beaten to death became a shrine, with local teenagers writing messages there in memory of him. Earlier this month, their messages were destroyed by paint-bombers.
In the last fortnight , a Catholic man who believes his son was murdered by UDR men in collusion with loyalist paramilitaries, in 1987, appealed to Lisburn Council to abandon plans to provide a site for a memorial to murdered soldiers from the regiment.
In south Armagh, a Celtic cross dedicated to an IRA man who died on hunger strike in 1981 was smashed up, the latest in a series of such attacks in recent months.
Sinn Féin opposes the UDR monument. It would be "deeply insulting to the many victims of this unionist militia", it said. If such monuments were to be erected, they should be in "non-contentious areas" or inside military bases.
The following day, the party denounced those who desecrated the hunger strike monument, and said "all monuments, all places of reflection and remembrance should be left alone and treated with respect".
Sadly, non-contentious areas are hard to find and, happily, military bases are being shut down. Where are the memorials to go? This was an intimate war - neighbours set up and murdered neighbours, leaving bitterly divided villages and towns. Memorials are sources of pride to some in the community, pain to others.
There is a longing to mark the spot where a loved person died, and you can't travel far in the North without passing the scene of a bloody outrage. Local people may discreetly mind the wreaths and wooden crosses left by strangers bereaved there, but other tributes are routinely torn apart and scattered, paint thrown over carved names, and sledgehammers taken to stones. Plenty of unappeased hatred remains.
A memorial to eight workmen blown up by an IRA landmine at Teebane crossroads in Co Tyrone in 1992 was often vandalised before it was completely wrecked in 1996. The rebuilt monument still comes under periodic attack. In what was claimed as a retaliatory attack for the Teebane massacre, loyalists murdered five Catholics on Belfast's Ormeau Road. In following years, Orange marchers made obscene gestures at a memorial to them.
As the Troubles recede, its atrocities appear all the more barbaric. The 11 victims of the IRA's Remembrance Day bomb of 1987 were in the crowd that had gathered, at the statue of the soldier with his head bowed, to remember the dead of the first and second World Wars. Sinn Féin's Alex Maskey broke an old taboo when he laid a poppy wreath at the Cenotaph in Belfast in 2002 on the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. The DUP accused him of insulting the dead.
The old struggle over territory arises. Memorials lay claim to their place. British war memorials occupy honoured, central places in towns and villages, and lately some of these have had smaller memorials placed beside them, commemorating members of the security forces killed since 1969.
There are rows about a "hierarchy of victims". Since 1998, Derry's Guildhall, formerly a symbol of unionist dominance, has had a stained glass window remembering those murdered by the British army on Bloody Sunday in 1972. Crossmaglen in south Armagh is dominated by a memorial sculpture depicting the IRA as the phoenix rising from the flames. Soon after it was put up in the 1970s, British soldiers reversed a Saracen into it.
Memorials can be problematic even for the relatives of those they intend to honour. Eleven bronze doves were attached to the war memorial in Enniskillen, but two of them have several times been sawn off, in protest it is believed over the wording of the plaque, which speaks of neighbours who died rather than Protestants who were murdered.
The brother of one of the hungerstrikers recently accused Sinn Féin of hypocrisy for including the INLA man in its grand commemorations.
His brother was under a death threat from the IRA before he went to jail, he said.
Nearly 4,000 people were killed. Some are commemorated on plaques, on banners, on murals, on rolls of honour or with church windows. Many lie in quiet graveyards, visited only by their families, their graves marked by simple headstones.
Twice in recent years loyalist gangs have besieged the blessing of Catholic graves at Carnmoney cemetery on the outskirts of Belfast, smashing headstones and threatening to "dig up the Fenians" . In the same graveyard, one of the Shankill Butchers is allowed to rest in peace, honoured as a warrior for Ulster.
Even Lost Lives, that fine memorial to "the men women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland Troubles", attracted controversy, with some unionists claiming it should not have included "terrorists". Some churches have Lost Lives permanently open on a lectern. There is no day of the year on which someone did not die.
Wilfred Owen wrote of "the old lie" that it was a fine and honourable thing to die for one's country. We still don't agree the name of the country under whose earth most of our dead lie. Many were carelessly sacrificed. Some are remembered with great ceremony, claimed as part of a great tradition, their dead voices allegedly clamouring for freedom for Ireland or for the faith of their Ulster forefathers to be upheld.
Others are ostentatiously forgotten. The "Disappeared" lie in bleakly unknown graves. A Protestant farmer planted a rose bush on her land in Fermanagh to mark the place where the body of an alleged IRA informer was dumped.
Paradoxically, memorials force us to remember but at the same time lay the past to rest. Some people are preoccupied for now with trying to find out the truth, and new and painful information is emerging about many of the killings.
Some people feel it is too soon to put up monuments, when the earth has hardly settled on the graves. Decades had to pass and Kilmainham Gaol had to be practically derelict before it was possible to address its legacy. Some think we should forget, even obliterate, the past. Others, as Edna Longley once put it, "remember at". They use their dead to accuse. The Love Ulster campaign comes to mind.
The Healing Remembering Group which includes many relatives of Troubles victims, is exploring ways of dealing with the past. It is considering the potential for a day of remembrance, and whether we need, or could stand, a truth and reconciliation type process. Last week it launched an appeal for ideas for a "living memorial museum" to commemorate all who died in the Troubles.
In a poem called Neither an Elegy Nor a Manifesto, dedicated to the people of Ireland, the late John Hewitt wrote:
"Bear in mind these dead. . ./I dare not risk using / that loaded word, Remember, / for your memory is a cruel web / threaded from thorn to thorn across / a hedge of dead bramble..."
Leaving the Troubles behind isn't easy for those most deeply hurt.