Living amid the rubble in East Belfast

Come to Duke St and you are feet from the 25-foot high wire fence dividing this row of houses from the nationalist Short Strand estate.

These houses are stained with paint bomb impacts. The residents are elderly and handicapped. But community worker Maggie Hutton says they’ve put up with attacks for months now and enough is enough.

“This has nothing to do with the UVF. People have been under sustained attack for months from the Short Strand – bricks, stones, paint-bombs – it just goes on and on and we’ve had enough.”

Well – their houses certainly bear the marks of sustained attacks.

Out on the main Newtownards Road itself the murals are changing. Far from continuing the post-ceasefire themes of peaceful heritage and culture – it’s becoming same old, same old.

“I’ve lived here 20 years now – couldn’t give this house away in a lottery.” Local resident Thomas McNulty

So you can see a mural commemorating the heritage of Harland and Wolff, the docks and The Titanic – classic post-ceasefire themes. But next to that not one but two more recent efforts – or at least recently repainted – lauding the East Belfast UVF.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland said this morning that the rioting was paramilitary-orchestrated – though when you see men in masks and surgical gloves you hardly need a detective to tell you that.

And who fired those shots? The police now say that dissident Republicans were to blame.

Perhaps the sanest observation on all this comes from Thomas McNulty (above) whose house faces out from the Short Strand – grilled windows facing out for protection.

“See I’ve lived here 20 years now – couldn’t give this house away in a lottery,” he says as he sweeps stones, a golf ball and used fireworks in his garden.

“It’s just the same down the years. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”