Violence in North - Dissidents should be ostracised

WRITER and Derry resident Jennifer Johnston, speaking in recent weeks, sounded a depressing note of warning about the North.

She said the old hatreds were being rekindled and warned that the economic and social structures needed to support a lasting peace were not yet in place.

She predicted that the disaffection so natural if an individual was unemployed was being harnessed by those who would destroy the hard-won progress of recent decades. Growing fears that the North, where the public sector employs a very high proportion of the workforce, will face greater cutbacks than other regions administered by David Cameron’s government only increase that dangerous disaffection.