Wolfgang here a a taste of reality for you about Northern Ireland, it's not all down to the IRA. Can you not read what Divis is saying to you,the IRA war is over.Why do you have to keep going on about the IRA ? Thugs Terrorised My Little Girl recently on a ferry. A dozen Rangers supporters subjected my seven-year-old girl and her mother to a terrifying tirade of sectarian abuse on their cross-channel trip back from Scotland. Stena Line had still not contacted me to after seven phone calls. There was no apology or anything. "But my seven-year-old daughter was so traumatised the day after that she couldn't even go to school. "I was due to pick up my 34-year-old partner Diane, who is Scottish, and my two girls of 15 months and seven in Belfast from the Stena HSS on Sunday evening. "I was expecting to meet them with big smiles, but instead Una was roaring crying. My seven-year-old, Tara, just burst into tears and ran into my arms, crying: 'Daddy, daddy, I am wild scared'. "Diane said the hatred in the fans' eyes was unbelievable, and not one person on the HSS came to her aid. She went to security and they just told her she would be all right if she stayed in one place. "She tried to move away but they followed her around for an hour, calling her every name under the sun. A girl even came up to Tara and called her an Catholic b******." The ordeal began when my family were in the children's play area and a Rangers supporter asked his seven-year-old what team she supported. "She said her dad supported Celtic and that was it," he said. "There were grown men with pints of beer chasing her around the matted children's area and Diane was terrified as to what was going to happen next. I went to security after they arrived home and a woman said, 'It's nothing to do with me, it is not my boat'." A spokeswoman for Stena Line said they previously banned all football supporters travelling as foot passengers after allegations about some Rangers fans, adding that they had a "zero tolerance" policy towards fans. She added: "Stena Line is investigating allegations of an alleged verbal abuse incident on board one of its vessels "This was obviously a very serious incident, especially where children are involved.In another inncident an Irish news Woman was assaulted and is recovering after she was assaulted by a gang in Derry. The woman was punched, kicked and verbally assaulted by a group of about 14 youths at the entrance to John Street at about 2215 BST on Wednesday. Details of the attack have just been released. It is understood that some of the gang were wearing Rangers shirts. Police said a sectarian motive was one line of inquiry.There is a belief that Protestants never denied a Catholic a job or a house or anything else. And they say they didn't have the distribution of these commodities in their gift.The Protestants of the Fountain, Rosemount, Bishop Street etc. ran Derry Corporation as a bastion of bigotry from the inception of the State to the onset of the civil rights movement. In all of that time, there was scarcely a woman and fewer than a dozen men of the working class on the Nationalist benches in the Guildhall. It's sometimes said that the clique in control in Derry was drawn from a fifteenth of the citizens. In fact, about a fifth would be more like it. The sleek professionals, larded businessmen and landed elite who ran Derry depended for the survival of their rotten system on persuading the mass of the Catholic people that their interests were served as long as they kept their heads down. In every generation, thousands of Catholics broke from this decrepit alliance to make common cause with Protestants seeking a progressive way forward. This happened mainly, although not exclusively, in the context of the labour movement. It is not possible to understand the sectarian history of the North, and particularly of Belfast, without taking these factors into account. The smirk of bigotry on the face of the junior Paisley on Hearts and Minds on Thursday night suggested that he well understood how neatly Father Reid's remarks and reaction to them had fitted into the twisted, sectarian perspective of the DUP. Watching Father Alec Reid last week I could not help but feel sorry for him and a bit uncomfortable for myself. Like others he caught the media bug and came off the worse for it. Being a priest does not give him any immunity against human weaknesses or the wrath of others. Of course like the rest of us, he can be goaded, he can get angry and he can lose the plot. Last week he did all three. It is one thing to operate as peace conduit in the shadowy underworld of paramilitarism or to pontificate from the relative safety of the pulpit but it is an entirely different thing to enter the mantrap of the media world. The quiet priest was and is a political player and as such should be prepared for the rough and tumble of murky politics and in particular the politics of trading hurts. Being naive on the Hearts and Minds programme is excusable but his comments comparing past unionist treatment of Catholics in Northern Ireland to Nazism are more than just regrettable. They were completely wrong. Anyone like me who has visited a concentration camp would know just how wrong. Of course he was goaded by an audience who did not want to listen. He was provoked by a speaker who has rarely faced up to his own myopic view of pain. Nevertheless, Fr Reid gave way to a choice of words that may have revealed a tinge of sectarianism that as Catholics we tend to deny in ourselves. As a leader of a faith community, Fr Reid should be even more mindful of what he says and where he says it. Many northern Catholics believe deep down that most northern Protestants will never change. Many more northern Protestants believe if you scratch the surface of most northern Catholics you will find an IRA supporter. These deep-seated suspicions are based less on experience of what Protestants or Catholics actually do or say and more to do with the urban mythologies corrupting our view of each other. Paramilitaries both orange and green have displayed more than enough signs of fascism to have copyright on the label – a label they deserve no matter how hard their political representatives try to spin it away. They murdered, butchered and maimed without fear or favour; with and without political cause. They robbed us of our youth, forced us to take sides and denied us free choice. They organise in militaristic fashion, police communities through fear, build media propaganda machines, intimidate other democrats, take over community groups and create political organisations all to further their own narrow agendas. They did justice to any Nazi Brown or Fascist Black shirt. Indeed at funerals they often wear the garb of fascism to remind the public of the sinister nature of power membership of their club bestows on volunteers. Often well-meaning mediators saw their mission as bringing these organisations in from the cold. These worthy and laudable advocates of peace thought that peace had no price, while in fact the price was already being paid by the innocent dead and the wasted years in prison. Fr Reid spent a lot of time bringing paramilitaries in from the cold. He had to look at them differently and less judgementally than the rest of society. Perhaps he had to don green-tinted glasses once or twice. In looking at them differently he must have had to struggle with their actions – after all he had watched what could only be described as a mob-driven crucifixtion of two soldiers in west Belfast. God knows what kind of conscience struggle Fr Reid the peacemaker faced over the years as the IRA continued its ill-warranted campaign while their politicos justified it. But he kept his eyes on the bigger prize of peace. All of which makes his comparison of unionism to Nazism all the more bizarre. Everyone knows that unionist political leaders for years fostered sectarianism, feeding it with annual doses of anti-Catholic rhetoric during the marching season. No-one questions that in the past there was systematic discrimination by political and civic unionism in employment. But to equate any of these actions with the Nazi treatment of the Jews is pure nonsense and in some countries could amount to the crime of denying the Holocaust and its true horrors against the Jewish faith. In quieter moments Fr Reid, as he no doubt will, may reflect deeply on the sentiments behind his analogy to both Protestants and Jews. But then again, perhaps so should we.Wolfgang take your blinkers off and attempt to see a Catholics side of it, or maybe you don't want to, is that closer to the truth ?