Clint Eastwood said 'make my day punk' and too many started to practice.

Despite this week’s apology from the IRA to its victims – seen by many as a ruse to win more concessions from the British Government – forgiveness is thin on the ground in Northern Ireland. MELANIE PHILLIPS found a country increasingly at the mercy of paramilitary gangsters.

In MAINLAND Britain, there’s an almost palpable air of exasperation and indifference about the recent violence in Northern Ireland. They’ve all been there before. But in Belfast there is despair.

Both Catholics and Protestants are aghast at what has happened: the descent of their society into institutionalised mayhem, and the effective connivance of a Northern Irish Government hiding behind the fiction of the peace process.

Bridie McCloskey says her son Joseph has been forced into permanent exile in England because of death threats from the IRA.

“People are getting killed on both sides but (British Prime Minister) Tony Blair doesn’t want to hear this,” she says. “People are expendable. All that matters is the peace process at any price.”

The situation in Northern Ireland is vastly worse than people realise. A province that is still the moral and constitutional responsibility of the UK has become a gangster state.

The peace process has not brought peace. Instead, paramilitary power is being consolidated over Catholics and Protestants through organised crime: smuggling, drug dealing, extortion and protection rackets. More deadly still, the province’s new Government has been comprised by some members’ paramilitary links. And worst of all, the peace process has effectively paralysed the forces of law and order.

Recently, after a year long special inquiry, a British parliamentary committee of Northern Ireland painted an astonishing picture of institutionalised systematic violence and intimidation in which terrorism and organised crime are now inextricably linked.

Fat from the terrorist godfathers laying down their arms, they have turned instead to racketeering.

The British MP’s found that smuggling of fuel, cigarettes and alcohol along with counterfeiting, drug dealing, extortion and protection rackets, are now netting about $50 million a year for the paramilitaries.

These terrorists are tightening their grip over their cowed communities through regular murder, physical violence, forced exile and the flaunting of illegally obtain wealth.

Armed robberies in 2001 increased by 264 per cent from the previous year, and hijacking by 100 per cent. Smuggled cigarettes have swamped the market.

About 120 petrol stations have been forced to close because of the prevalence of illicit fuel, and nearly two-thirds of those left are involved in the illegal trade.

Such corruption is almost endemic within the fabric of Northern Ireland, with legitimate business “interwoven into partnerships with criminal organization”.

The racketeering is on such a scale that it is spreading fast to mainland Britain.

What’s more, it is feeding and facilitating terrorism. There is significant evidence, said the MP’s, that the paramilitaries are improving the capacity to mount further terrorist campaigns, with their vast illegal incomes financing propaganda and weapons.

So what is the British Government’s response to this terrifying situation? On the day the report was published, Britain’s Northern Ireland Secretary, John Reid, took tea with the loyalist thugs who loomed so menacingly from its pages.

It is like the Italian Government inviting the mafia in to iron out a few problems over a bowl of pasta.

Not that anyone else seemed any more exercised. The committee report was barely covered in the British press, where the peace process has largely anaesthetised thought.

Yet because of the gangster culture, both loyalist and republican communities are awash with arms. “Decommissioning” of weapons in such circumstanced is a sick joke. “The place is a tinder box waiting to go up,” said one despairing resident. There is a mad sense of unreality. Things are plainly happening and yet are blandly denied.

Mrs McCloskey, for example, says the IRA forced her 31-year-old son Joseph into exile after he helped bouncers at a bar break up a fight in which IRA men were involved. After this, an attempt was made on his life.

Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, denies he has been exiled and says there is no evidence of paramilitary involvement.

But Mrs McCloskey says she has been told by IRA men, including members of the Northern Ireland Government, that if her son returns he is a dead man.

The terrorists may no longer be shooting the security services but they have taken over law and order. The police are demoralised and emasculated. About 2000 officers have been paid off from a mainly Protestant police force of 8000, part of a restructuring ostensibly designed to win the trust of Catholics.

In fact, this has simply wrecked the criminal investigation division of the force. And the training of new recruits has turned into a disaster.

Anti-terrorist training has been stopped on the grounds that peace has broken out, and practical aspects of policing are being ignored in favour of grovelling guidance on “community relations”.

Both republican and loyalist paramilitaries are fomenting trouble in order to turn their communities against the police so that the men of violence can control them instead.

And they are succeeding. Wherever paramilitaries hold sway, whether Catholic or Protestant, the police have retreated. The result, as paramilitary punishment expert professor Liam Kennedy has documented, is sickening violence by terrorists against their own communities.

Since the Good Friday agreement – paving the way for a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland, overseen by Britain – shootings and beatings of young people under the age of 19 have increased spectacularly, with republicans particularly involved in the huge rise in such violence against Catholic children aged 13 to 17.

The paramilitaries set themselves up as quasi-police forces to discipline their own young offenders who are committing break-ins and doing drug deals.

As Professor Kennedy remarks, these beatings are a way to exercise paramilitary power “even at the cost of the torture and mutilation of young Catholics”, and are no longer seen as beyond the pale of civilised behaviour.

What’s more, when the police do arrest someone, he is often released.

One republican terrorist, let out of jail as part of the peace process, was subsequently arrested for attempted murder but released on bail by a judge, arrested again for rioting and released after the police told the court he was a “valuable asset” in keeping the lid on his part of Belfast.

Now this man has been employed as a community development worker, with a salary paid by the taxpayer.

While the infrastructure of terror has been left intact, such appeasement destroys the infrastructure of law and order. The danger is that intense Protestant disillusion will translate into a rout of Northern Ireland First Minister David Trimble’s moderate Ulster Unionists by Ian Paisley’s extremist Democratic Unionist Party.

If that happens, said one observer, the moderate Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party will also wither away. It will then be Mr. Paisley’s party versus Sinn Fein, and a threatened slide into civil war. Does Mr. Blair have the honesty and courage to face up to this situation – or will he turn his back on the mafia state he helped create?