A tussle of loyalties grips Short Strand, a community of 3,000 Catholics set off by high fences from the militantly unionist Protestant area of 60,000 next door. McCartney and the men accused of attacking him lived here, on streets where the IRA had always been seen as a bulwark against the community's enemies.
"In certain circumstances, you need them," a burly resident with a shaved head said of the IRA's soldiers. Unionist politician "Ian Paisley couldn't give a damn about this place; now he's all concerned," scoffed the man, who would not give his name.
"I wouldn't want to be in their position," Kate Gorman, a postal worker walking her young child, said of the people being asked to come forward. "But if you were, you'd have to do the right thing."
Her friend Bernadette Ronay agreed. "Any true republican is disgusted by the killing, and so are the real IRA," she said.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, expressing shock at the IRA pronouncement that it was willing to kill the perpetrators, said republicans faced a stark choice.
"They can either embrace the democratic and peaceful route or be excluded," Blair said.
The U.S. special envoy to Northern Ireland, Mitchell B. Reiss, last week added the Bush administration's view. "It's in Sinn Fein's interest to make a clear break," he said.
Little wonder that Sinn Fein leaders were not asked to the White House for St. Patrick's Day on Thursday, as they have been in the past. Instead, invitations went to McCartney's sisters and his girlfriend.
Irish political historian Paul Bew thinks the snub could be a harbinger. "I am starting to hear the A-word, for Arafat, applied to Sinn Fein," said the Queen's University professor, who added that Sinn Fein was far from being out of the political game.
Still, it has been an enormous fall for Sinn Fein, which in December seemed on the verge of a historic power-sharing deal with Paisley's Protestant-based Democratic Unionist Party -- until Paisley insisted on public photos of the IRA destroying its weapons beforehand. Paisley said the IRA deserved to be seen in "sackcloth and ashes." The IRA did not agree.
Days after the negotiations broke down, about $50 million was stolen from Northern Bank's downtown Belfast cash center in a well-planned heist that included hostage-taking. The head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland said almost immediately that it looked like an IRA job.
