“For intimidation to be successful, people have to be isolated, and we try to break the level of intimidation,” Maxwell said. “We try to get the person out of immediate danger. But we refuse to deal with the paramilitaries. It’s an issue of human rights. People have a right to the presumption of innocence, to a free trial. Human rights are not up for negotiation. The paramilitaries have no moral or political mandate. We don’t want to legitimate them or their right to judgment.”

The strangest figure working alongside Maxwell at Fait is a young man named Henry Robinson. In his youth, Robinson was a paramilitary, a kneecapper. “Now I’m a vegetarian,” he told me over lunch. “I learned not to eat meat in jail It’s cruel to animals.” Robinson is from a Catholic suburb, Downpatrick, and is one of eighteen children. The family lived in a three-bedroom house, “so it was a wee bit crowded at times,” he said. His father drove buses and ambulances. He himself was a poor student—“at the very bottom of the slowest classes”—and left school at sixteen.

“I couldn’t wait to start killing British soldiers,” he said. “I was in Catholic schools, where we’d recite the names of the thirty-two counties of Ireland (counting the six of the North) as indoctrination. You got the impression in school that Cromwell was still roaming the streets doing evil things to the Irish, or something. When the riots started, the Catholics felt under attack, and so did the Protestants. A lot of recruiting went on. It would be a long time before I’d ever think that sending British soldiers home in coffins was not the whole answer.

“When I got into the whole thing, I was working as a barman, and it was the secretness of the paramilitaries that was the appeal. You know—boys as kids like meeting in secret and talking about secret things. Now, with the paramilitaries it was the same thing, only they were talking about sinister things. I joined up with something called the Official I.R.A.—a splinter group that had a more socialist-type tinge to its nationalism. It still exists, but off on the fringe, really.

“I shot a guy who’d been I.R.A. He’d just been released from prison. There’d been a fight between him and a guy from our group. He was throwing his weight around. Our group met and decided the shooting would take place. I’d already been shown how to use a gun in some kitchen somewhere. It was a pretty simple thing. You don’t have to be a genius to learn how to fire a pistol into some guy’s face. I was nineteen at the time—my first time. I had a .38 revolver. It was a really strange feeling, a rush. A lot of adrenaline goes through your body. It’s a macho thing, a feeling of utter control. That’s what guns are all about, I guess—the feeling that people are going to do what you say. That’s how you advance your argument, sticking a gun at someone.

“So there he was, standing at the bottom of the hill on Stream Street. It was the middle of the day. I had a mask on, and there was another guy with me. The guy was with two of his mates. I walked up to him and said I was with the Irish Republican Army. When his mates saw the gun, they scattered. I shot him three times, hit him in both legs. If I’d been told to kill him, I’d have done it. Paramilitaries are like fundamentalists. They don’t question, they just do it.

“I ran for our ghetto, but a guy I knew in school saw me. I had my mask off by that time. (I didn’t say I was a bright paramilitary, did I?) And so he told the police. I’m glad he did, too, because if he hadn’t I’d be in Hell by now.”

A few weeks ago, Sinn Fein sponsored so-called Peace Commission hearings at the Conway Mill. A panel of cheerful, nodding Sinn Fein leaders listened all day to a series of individuals and groups who had come to plead their case: republicans, unionists, community workers, academics. The press was invited, and that was very much the point. Sinn Fein, we were to believe, has a humane side. The peace side. But neither the press nor the participants seemed much deluded. A young woman, a Protestant minister, came to speak, and she refused to give her name. “If I were to use my name, I’d be in trouble,” she told me afterward. Her hands were vibrating. “It’s not considered exactly squeaky clean to be with Sinn Fein,” she said. “I’m petrified who could see me here and who could know.”

The most astonishing moment of the day came when a spindly old gentleman, a surgeon, arrived to give his own testimony. He was William Rutherford, retired after nearly twenty years as an emergency-room physician at the Royal Victoria Hospital, in West Belfast. One of his patients, back in 1984, was Gerry Adams, who had been shot by a team of Ulster Freedom Fighters after leaving a Belfast court. One of the bullets that hit Adams barely missed his spine. His wounds were so severe that it can be fairly said that Dr. Rutherford, a Protestant, saved his life.

Adams showed up at the Peace Commission for a few minutes, but rushed off before his rescuer spoke. He might have done well to stay. Like the psychiatrist Dr. Lyons, Dr. Rutherford had been picking up the pieces all his professional life, and he spoke with a quiet passion of the need for the most obvious and difficult things: the laying down of arms; an agreement that has the consent and cooperation of all sides.

A few days later, I drove out to Dr. Rutherford’s house, in a prosperous development in South Belfast. He is still healthy at seventy-two. He described the varieties of gore he had seen in his career.

“I saw my first bullet wound in 1969, when I was already quite an experienced doctor,” he said. “I was stunned. Disbelief. I knew that this did not happen in Belfast. I’d never even seen a gunshot wound. It was as if a red-hot needle had bored through the flesh, so small and yet . . . significant. It was so definite, so real, and yet something inside me said, ‘No, this cannot be.’ The corrupting effect of armed struggle and warfare! Sure, people had robbed banks and stores before the Troubles started, but they were quite happy to do it without shooting anybody. But now, even if the political struggle fades from the scene, we’ll be left with a Belfast of guns.

“When it started, you had people on either side getting worked up. The poor Protestants had so little, but if the Catholics, who had even less, grabbed their share what would they, the Prods, be left with? That was the conflict. At first, the mass of injuries was cuts, bruises, broken bones, broken noses. Then the guns came out. The next great phase was the bombings in pubs, in streets, bombs left in the boots of cars. There was a period when we used to get these all the time. From one bomb you could get a hundred people coming through the door. The I.R.A. was largely the initiator at that point, but sometimes the Prods would do it and pretend the I.R.A. had done it. In the early stages, the bombs were mostly homemade explosives, so you were seeing a lot of people torn up by flying glass. It depended on your proximity to the bomb. They lost legs. Sometimes, when they were killed they were blown to bits, and you couldn’t even tell how many corpses you were dealing with, exactly. It was strange, but when you are working as a professional in these circumstances you have got technical problems to overcome. You are taking care of blood loss, making sure you are setting up the right I.V. fluids, alerting the right people to do this and that.