Will N Ireland come out on the side of peace?

I leave Belfast a city preparing for some sort of manifestation of resistance to a return to killing. Nobody knows how many people will turn out.

Indeed, I suspect a lot of people will just stand outside their workplaces and may do it in communities right across Northern Ireland.

Curiously, this is the fifth anniversary of the Madrid bombings, which also shook a civil population out of its lethargy. The manifestations of popular sentiment which followed were vastly enhanced by the upsurge of resentment towards the Aznar government.

The then prime minister had tried to exploit anti-ETA sentiment in Spain by blaming the Basque separatists for what an official investigation subsequently determined to have been an al-Qaida operation.

Alas, history is littered with these awful events. Last night I and my team were in a café talking over the day’s events. Two very angry unionists at a neighbouring table had been earwigging our conversation and castigated us for “not understanding”, saying if you have never lived here you will never understand.

There’s a generation growing up, a tiny minority of whom think they missed something. Many of these are kids of desperate housing estates like that in Craigavon, growing up feeling their fathers and grandfathers found an identity that has eluded them.

In Northern Ireland fundamentally everyone is coming out on one side, all parties united in the face of attacks from a group, or groups, who appear to be traditionally disaffected, alienated, angry, and peeved that they missed their place in the bomb-throwing sun.