I was away on hoilidays or would have answered your question sooner, Dave.

Yes, I gather the guns etc., are finally silent. But in the 10 after the 1994 peace deal, there were some 2,000 plus punishment beatings, kneecappings etc., the majority of them by loyalist groups, plus a number of murders, several of them still unsolved. However, in the last last few years even this seems to have died down. That's a good thing at least. Some people will grow up and live out their lives that otherwise might not have done so. A generatuion will grow up that won't have firsthand experinece of the fear and tension living in such a situation brings, such as the fear of walking down the 'wrong' road at the 'wrong' time, drinking in the 'wrong' pub, having too-predictable a daily routine that might get you killed, etc.,

But i think those who posted here saying that it's time people forgot their differences are missing the key point. It was never about religious difference, even when religious difference was shorthand for different background and cultures. People didn't take up arms against one another because they went to different churches, or listened to a different type of folk music etc.,

The problems happened because one part of the community, who indentified themselves by origin, religion and culture wanted to have total dominance of the society in which they lived, at the expense of another part of the community who were different to them in some way or another. To this end, since the formation of the northern state in 1920 and especially from 1922 onwards, when the formation of the southern Free State confirmed this partition, the unionist section of the population worked hard to ensure the two communities were kept divided. Protestant proletarians learned to be thankful for the little they had because their catholic counterparts had even less. That left the ruling elites an ever freer hand to create in their own words "a protestant state for a preotestant people" They completley subverted and distorted the democratic apparatus of the state to serve this end. Electoral boundaries were rigged in order to provide protestnat dominated local councils and government even in areas where catholics were a majority. Catholics were thwarted from obtaining work at most protestant firms, found it impossible to get ANY job in the public sector and were discrimintaed against at every level in society from housing, to jobs, to social welfare etc.,

This state of affairs - an effective apartheid state - couldn't last forever. In the 1960s many people had access to TV, or news filtered through in other ways and could see what was going on in the USA with Black Civil Rights movement. The catholics of the north got 'uppity' and started demanding civil rights too. Note that the IRA campaign in the north had petered out by 1962, after a brief flurry in the early 1950s ("Sean South of Garryowen" fame). That didn't stop loyalists murdering two catholics for sport on Malvern Street in 1966. Nonetheless, what the catholic civil rights protestors wanted was equal rights as equal British citizens. Thoughts of a 'united Ireland' were forgotten (at leats for the moment) as unpractical. But even this was too much for unionists (remember also that the act of marching around waving placards has particular resonace in the north - think of the Orange Order: "where we march, we own") and so with worldly-weariness, they picked up their baseball bats, bricks and so on and laid into the catholic civil rights marchers (the UDA was formed about this time for just this purpose). The mainly-protestant police (the RUC) did nothing to stop them, and sometimes even joined in.

Now if unionists could have found it in their hearts to generously grant equal rights to the other human beings sharing their turf, there might have been no Troubles. But you can't expect a generation of articulate angry young people to put up with such treatment for long, and the IRA re-appeared to defend catholic areas (though they were woefully equipped to do so at the time, 1969 / 1970) from loyalist mobs. Hundreds of catholic families were burned out of their homes in what would now be called ethnic cleansing. (The IRA later split into different factions, the Provisional IRA, or 'Provos' as they became known being the more active and aggressive on the ground in general).

Anyway, I won't bore you all with history you probably already know, but just to remind that we are notr talking simply religious, or even cultural difference here.

One might as well have argued back in 1950 or 1960 that it was 'time for black people and white people in America to forget their differences and make peace between them'.

But Peace is nmot simply the absence of violence. Peace can only come about in a society where there is real justice, equality and fairness. Peace is not something that is legislated, constructed out of thin air. It comes about naturally when the above conditions are met. The northern state from 1920 up to recent times (and it still has some way to go) is a stern reminder of the danger of assuming a state is truly democratic simply because it has the veneer of democratic institutions and apparent democratic procedures. It is a reminder of how a state can call itself democartic and appear to the casual observer to be so, yet disenfranchise a whole section of the population.

Peace will come to the north if democracy works, discrimination ends, justice etc., are present. The only hiccup left then will be if nationalists vote to reunite with the south. As another mudcatter here noted, given the current unionist mindset that is likely to create some problems. Unionists have held a privileged position for so long that they simply cannot get out of that mindset to believe the 'other side' won't try and do the same thing if Ireland is reunited.