Growing up in the shadow of violence

BELFAST

Brenda Whelan has spent the past five years going to a school that's 200 yards away from Dave Simmons's house. Five days a week, Dave travels past Brenda's home on the way to work.

In almost any other part of the world, two teenagers who have spent so much time in close proximity, who have danced to the same music, who have been soaked by the same rain, and who share many of the same fears, would know each other well.

But, in all probability, they will never meet. Brenda is an Irish Catholic. Dave is Protestant and British.

Yet, both use the same words to describe their common dream: To leave the riots and bombs of Northern Ireland to find out what it's like to live without "looking over your shoulder all the time."

Even after the IRA's first, historic step last week toward decommissioning its weapons, Dave and Brenda, and many of their peers, are doubtful Northern Ireland will ever be a safe, prosperous place to build a future.

"Belfast is still a dangerous place to live," says Dave. "I'm not sure the IRA are being truthful about their real long-term intentions - but I suppose there is slightly more hope in the back of my head." He adds that the Catholic paramilitaries and others who want to form a single, united Ireland "have said so many times that they want a peaceful future, but you can't be sure. Hopefully, they'll give up violence for good, but it won't make any difference to my plans to leave."

Brenda says she is worried after hearing that some Catholics "would say the IRA had given up and that was wrong, and they wouldn't agree with it and there would be fighting within our own community."

Ed Cairns, professor of psychology at the University of Ulster, is not surprised at the cautious response of both young people to what others have greeted as good news.

"Repeated surveys show that young people, like their parents, are increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for a lasting peace and economic prosperity in Northern Ireland.

"Young people, especially middle-class young people of ability, are increasingly leaving to study in Britain. These are the leaders of the future, who don't like being labeled as either Catholic or Protestant," he says.

Brenda learned early what it means to be a target of hate. When she was 2, a bomb thrown through a window of her family's home set the furniture on fire. The teen now studies computer technology one day a week at a renovated linen mill. Recently, she had left her workstation for a lunch break when, two minutes later, a pipe bomb exploded right where she had been sitting.

Dave, a wiry, fit youth with close-cut hair in the current Belfast fashion, was beaten two years ago by a gang of Catholics, loyal to the Irish Republic, and speaks with barely concealed contempt for those who have forced him to consider eventually moving away from his hometown. A biology student, he has taken a year off from college to earn money.

Both Dave and Brenda met others of a different denomination when they began part-time jobs. But neither has visited the homes of their "other religion" workmates - because they wouldn't feel safe, they say.

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