"ALL you hear about, wherever you go now, is people talking about the situation." Catherine Haslett is a 19 year old Protestant living in the Waterside in Derry.
She doesn't come from a very political family, but the IRA Canary Wharf bomb focussed her political conscious. "I was surprised at how used I had got to normality, so it was a shock to the system, to hear people living politics and being so polarised about it again".
Despite an undoubted wish to move beyond it, Derry's history still exerts a powerful grip on those born into the city in the past 25 years. But more than the end of the ceasefire, the events the past month have confirmed in young people from each side a gloomy mistrust of each other's political leaders the government and the RUC.
Eamonn Curran is 25 and a Catholic. He has lived in Derry's middle class Culmore Road all his life. "I was shattered when the ceasefire broke, but I was stirred up by the Garvaghy Road and the Ormeau Road. I would like to have believed that the police had changed. But I saw them acting so obviously on the side of the Orange Order ... " It had been a long time since had that sense that "we don't belong", he said.
Mark (not his real name) is from Tandragee in Armagh. He is the only one I talked to that asked not to be named. "My employer told me not to be here today . . . let's just say I work in the civil service." He was in Derry to march in the Apprentice Boys' parade, and sat with me in the sunshine outside St Columb's Cathedral after the Protestant service.
"For me the ceasefire was nice, in the sense that I could go places I might not normally go, and mix with people I wouldn't normally." He had no problem with Roman Catholics. "It's the Republicans I can't take. Sinn Fein/IRA stir up their own people.
"It galls me that we are made to look like the oppressors. It's a false picture and very frustrating . . . ordinary Catholics are not offended by us marching, it's Sinn Fein wanting to deny us that right."
The Orange Order was the only thing Protestants had to bring them together, he said.
Catherine denies this. "The Orange Order doesn't represent my Protestantism. It's not my culture, though as citizens they should be allowed to walk along the walls.
Eamonn disagrees. "A lot of people remember when they used to walk the walls and, throw pennies into the Bogside, rubbing the Catholics' noses in how poor they were and how powerful the Protestants were." Whether, they are provocative today is not an issue if the people don't want them there, he said.
Ciara Gallagher, a 25 year old Catholic, believes the unionists are determined about their marches because, "they think it's the thin end and it will crumble if they give an inch". Eamon sees this as the major underlying problem, "deep down there are very few, differences between Catholics and Protestants", he said. He saw unionist political leaders as a huge part of the problem. "None of them takes a stand, does anything unpopular with their people, the way Hume would take risks."
Perhaps ironically, Mark would concur. "We have to look after ourselves," he said. "In the last month, the government has not been man enough to stand up to the IRA, and the leaders of the Bogside Residents Group. Mayhew? How are we supposed to respect a man who talks to IRA/Sinn Fein, which exists to kill Protestants?"
Mark said he loves Northern Ireland and intends to stay. "Roman Catholics and Protestants are living together all over the province. It's just the IRA heightening tensions . . . But if it came to a civil war, he said, he would be prepared to fight. "I would be prepared to die."
Catherine finds politicians wholly uninspiring also. "They just seem to treat the whole thing like a competition. If one wins the other has to have lost." They are always playing to their own people, she thinks. "I was at a supposedly neutral rally in the Bogside on Thursday and even there I didn't feel comfort able. It was very much Sinn Fein oriented."
Ciara is critical of Britain's lack of appreciation of sensitivities. "Mayhew had no understanding of the ramifications of Drumcree, " she said. "The British don't realise they are a huge part of the problem. You can't have a referee that wears a Union Jack shirt."
Next year, Catherine plans to study in Glasgow. "If I had a place in Queens I'd still go to Glasgow. I'm so pissed off with the situation here."
It isn't that she doesn't like Derry, but liking the city is not enough to come back "if it's all the same . . ."
