A MONTH ago Paula McCartney was a happy mother of five healthy children, a housewife enjoying a return, at the age of 40, to the academic life at Queen’s University Belfast.

Then the IRA murdered her brother for the most banal of reasons. “That’s where one of them lives,” she says, meaning the killers and pointing to a terraced house a few hundred yards from her home in the staunchly republican Short Strand — an enclave of about 3,000 Roman Catholics protected by towering “peace lines” on the edge of Protestant East Belfast.

These streets are where, in local mythology, the Provisionals were born, taking their first “military action” in defence of the district when it came under attack from loyalists in 1969.

But suddenly — devastatingly so for the “Ra” — its image among sympathisers has flipped from protector to intimidator, enforcer, even parasite. And murderer. The Provisional movement is facing probably the greatest challenge to its hegemony in Belfast’s working- class Catholic heartlands since the “peace people” of the 1970s.

Now, just as then, the challenge is coming from strong, brave women — in this case the five McCartney sisters and their sixth “sibling”, Bridgeen Hagan, the partner of Robert McCartney, who died of appalling knife wounds after he was attacked by a drunken group of local IRA men in a meaningless pub row, which he was trying to defuse.

We pass the home of another high-ranking IRA man, one of the three whom the organisation claimed last Friday to have “dismissed” over the killing of Mr McCartney, 33, a hugely popular forklift driver. “I must have been walking about here with my eyes and ears shut all these years,” Ms McCartney says later in her neat living room, through which have trooped a procession of journalists, politicians and a bishop since the sisters decided that not even the IRA was going to prevent the family from seeing their brother’s killers in court.

She considers herself to be just another example of the decent Short Strand people: resilient in the face of all the adversity the Troubles threw their way. The IRA was a constant if unremarked presence as she grew up.

“In my opinion the IRA men of those days were more honourable than they are now,” she said. “A lot of it’s to do with a different calibre of people, abuse of power, idle hands and psychopathic tendencies.”

She and her sisters have the names of the 12 IRA men that they say killed Robert, stabbing, gouging and kicking him to death in an alleyway. Then with the casual efficiency of years of paramilitarism they returned to the bar where the row broke out and carefully wiped away all the scientific evidence, removed the closed-circuit television tapes and warned everyone present that it would be better for them to remain silent.

It is bad knowing their identities but it is worse when there seems no possibility, for now, of criminal charges being pressed against them. Paula and her sisters have leafleted the entire district appealing for witnesses to come forward. “We stuck the leaflets through the 12 men’s doors too, but so far they haven’t responded,” she says with a flash of anger. “My life’s been turned upside down.

The most political thing I ever did before this was to go on an anti-Iraq war demo. Robert’s death has changed me, but the fact is that we as a family didn’t sit down to hatch a plan to damage Sinn Fein or the IRA. The murderers did that — and very successfully.”

It is some small consolation to the McCartney sisters that their stand is gaining momentum, making people less afraid of the IRA, more prepared to challenge the darkness in their midst.

“I’d rather have Robert back but it would be a fitting tribute to him if we did achieve that,” Ms McCartney said.

“But people should remember that we didn’t set out to clean up the town or change Irish politics. All we want is justice for Robert.”

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