Northern Ireland returns to war. Could that really be happening? Everything about these recent tragedies seems so horribly familiar. The locations of the murders, the way three cold-blooded executions were carried out, the claims of responsibility, the apparent universal condemnations. All of this could have been plucked from any year of the Troubles you care to choose.

In those days, events such as these would have been routine. Two soldiers killed, a policeman shot dead. On the Northern Ireland beat by the end of the "war", compassion fatigue was in full flow and even the deaths of two servicemen would struggle to dominate the news agenda in the way of the latest atrocity.

As a correspondent based in the province, you might drive out to a location and arrive to find your colleagues standing around at the edge of a taped-off area, guarded by the police. The Troubles were never officially a war as far as the British Government was concerned and so the locations of murders were always treated as "crime scenes".

You would be told to call the press office in Belfast for details — in those days it was the Royal Ulster Constabulary — or its opposite number in the Army, neither of which were likely to tell you much more than you already knew or suspected. Then you were left to try your luck knocking on a few doors. A British journalist working for The Times was never warmly received. In both republican and loyalist areas, there was contempt for what was regarded as a British establishment newspaper, albeit for very different reasons.

If you had been in the province for a while, you learnt to understand the pattern of that lethal argument. A loyalist murder would surely be followed by a republican reprisal or vice versa. A seemingly successful political initiative would be followed, after a pause for dramatic effect, by an IRA bombing. The forces of democracy answered by the sound of explosions in a hastily evacuated street, or the deadly thud of a small package of Semtex concealed under someone's car, or the round of an AK47 delivered on the doorstep.

When I left Belfast in August 1993 there appeared no end in sight to a running sore that had been weeping misery for more than 30 years. Since then Northern Ireland and Anglo-Irish relations have made extraordinary strides and left the doubters eating their words. Not only has a settlement been reached, but some of the key players in the new entente have been those who most fervently prosecuted the quarrel.

Easily the most eerie aspect of the last couple of days for me has been the sound on my car radio of Martin McGuinness, allegedly once a senior IRA commander, sounding just like a Northern Ireland Secretary of State from the Eighties. Just as Peter Brooke or Brian Mawhinney would have put it in the hours after an "atrocity", McGuinness spoke about how the latest violence would not deflect right-thinking people from pursuing and maintaining the peace.

The man we used to see only at Sinn Fein party conferences or giving orations at the funerals of IRA volunteers in the republican heartlands on the border, even argued that the Real IRA's actions only underlined how successful the peace process had been. It was like a throwback to the old logic of the masters of Direct Rule.

Students of Irish history are well aware that, in the past, outbreaks of peace have always been followed by a return to the bomb and the bullet. Most of us had dared to dream, and still do, that the settlement this time had gone too far, was too well entrenched, to be usurped by a new generation of hotheads. But the deadly matrix of tit-for-tat, a Northern Ireland speciality, could so easily take hold once again and all the bitterness (another Belfast special) could return.

No wonder you can almost hear, on both sides of the Irish Sea, the sound of people walking on eggshells. Among the key questions we await answers to are how well are former loyalist paramilitiaries under control, how developed in terms of its operational effectiveness is the Real IRA and, perhaps most importantly, how much control or influence do the old Provisional IRA and its political wing retain in hardline republican areas, all the better to choke off those who dream only of a return to the bleak landscape of the past.

Edward Gorman was The Times's Ireland Correspondent from 1989 to 1993.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Milk: do we need a dairy godmother?
• DIY: the women doing it for themselves
• First double portrait of Princes unveiled