PEACE and good will to all men - whatever happened to that sentiment in Ulster?

Struggling against centuries of blind sectarian hatred, the slim prospects of harmony in Northern Ireland embraced in the bogged-down peace process were today looking grim.

For though officially still holding, an end to the two-year loyalist ceasefire was signalled by a car bomb attack on a leading Belfast republican - in what was clearly a reprisal for Friday's IRA shooting attack on a Unionist politician as he visited his sick son in hospital.

Now, a dreadful downward spiral, dragging Ulster back to the years of the bomb and bullet, is in view. Yet, having tasted peace and glimpsed normality during the days before the IRA blew the ceasefire apart with the Canary Wharf bomb in February, do the people of Northern Ireland want - at Christmas of all times - to plunge back into the dreadful past?

The vast majority, we are sure, do not.

But though they may have little or no involvement with the paramilitaries, do they ever question whether their own sentiments and the way they vote sustain them - by clearly painting the dividing line between the two communities in Northern Ireland?

At a time when peace and good will are supposed to prevail, they would do well to demonstrate their belief in that sentiment.

If they did that the men of terror, now poised to wreck what vestige of the peace process is left, would be marginalised from the community rather than supported by its instinctive divisions.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.