Source: The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123699310634827165.html
On Friday, this village in the heart of Ulster buried a local constable, Stephen Carroll. Townspeople gathered under a gray sky to watch Mr. Carroll's funeral procession, as a lone bagpiper played. Four days earlier, the constable had been shot in the back of the head as he and other officers responded to a woman's call for help.
With his murder and that of two soldiers just two days before, a fear across Northern Ireland is being reborn: Could the age-old grudge between Protestants and Catholics be spiraling into bloodshed again?
"There is a sense of disbelief," said Dolores Kelly, a councilor for the borough of Craigavon, where Constable Carroll was slain. "My God, what's going on here?"
This week, three men were detained in connection with Constable Carroll's killing. One, according to Belfast's Irish News, is a former member of Sinn Fein, the political party closely associated with the bloody fight for an independent Ireland.
"The Troubles," as the long Protestant-Catholic strife is known, defined Northern Ireland for the three decades starting in the late 1960s and took about 3,000 lives. Catholic "republicans" using car bombs and snipers sought a united Ireland comprising both the Republic of Ireland and the Northern Ireland province, opposed by mostly Protestant "loyalists" seeking to keep Northern Ireland part of the U.K. The Protestant forces shed blood, too, spurring a long stretch in which residents lived in fear of wandering into the wrong territory or even opening their door. The presence of heavily armed British troops heightened anxiety in Catholic neighborhoods.
Relative peace descended on Northern Ireland following a historic peace accord signed in 1998, followed in 2005 by the nationalist Irish Republican Army's agreement to disarm. This month's killings, in contrast to those during The Troubles, have prompted an outpouring of grief from both sides, who are determined to see that there is no return to a cycle of violence. Standing together to denounce the attacks this week were Peter Robinson, a leader of the Protestant Democratic Unionist Party, and Martin McGuiness, a Sinn Fein politician and former IRA leader.