Freedom?

I am a Belfast boy, born and bred and proud of it.

I am a boy from a country where civil war has killed 3 innocent people in the last 3 days. I am not proud of that.

For all the highs I have felt while Norn Iron (as it is affectionately known) has been soaring on the high of peace, I feel today as if someone has put their hand inside my chest and twisted my stomach around. There is little more that I can add to this discussion on top of what all the people and politicians of my wee country have already said, except my personal experience.

I am thankful that I grew up in Northern Ireland when I did, in a time when there was relative peace compared to the Northern Ireland of my parents in the late 60's, 70's and early 80's. I was born in 1984 into a country that was deeply divided and killing itself one person at a time. I remember being woken in the middle of the night by a massive bomb exploding in the Drumkeen Hotel, a five minute walk from my house. It broke the massive living room window in my best friend Tim's house and shook ours until I was sure it was going to fall down. That was the 27th of May 1993 and it was the fourth time in 12 months that the hotel had been bombed by the IRA.

I had a friend whose dad served in the police and every morning he had to check underneath his car in case there was a bomb waiting to explode when he started his engine.

My Mum used to get evacuated regularly from her office with bomb scares, and without mobile phones you never knew exactly what was happening until you got a phone call to say everything was alright and she was back in the office.

Nostalgia isn't so rosy when you look hard at these things.

Those days were gone... until Saturday, and now they are back. It makes me sick to my stomach that the terrorists who the government chooses to ignore, who are somehow excluded from Britain and America's 'noble' war on terror, who were released early from their life sentences, are once again giving Northern Ireland the kind of reputation 98% of us have worked so hard to get away from over the past few years.

What makes it even worse is that for some reason or another, I feel guilty that I'm not even at home anymore. I don't know what's causing it. Maybe I feel guilty on behalf of the bastards who murdered those two soldiers on Saturday, both of them younger than me. Maybe I wish I was there to share in the mourning over the first police officer to have been shot dead since 1998... the truth is I really don't know what's giving me the sick feeling that I should be at home. Maybe it's just true that you can take the boy out of Belfast, but you can't take Belfast out of the boy.

For the first time I can remember properly I am worried about my country. I'm worried about my friends who are now in the police. I'm worried about my parents and my sisters and my brother. I'm worried about all my friends and family still living at home. I'm worried about taking Fiona and my future kids home to see my family. I'm worried about the people whose lives are going to be turned upside down because their son or husband is going to be shot by people claiming to do it in the name of 'freedom'... I'm worried that my country is going to collapse back into everything we have learned to hate in ourselves, and all I can do is pray to God that it doesn't.

Martin Luther King said "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." I am demanding my freedom.