Since Easter, our newspapers and television screens have been showing us images from Northern Ireland we thought were a thing of the past: a bus being burned, children pelting police with rocks, young men in balaclavas hurling Molotov cocktails. A few years ago we would have taken no notice. But now these images seem incongruous – what’s going on? Didn’t the Good Friday Agreement fix the problem? For an exploration of the causes of the recent outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland see a piece I wrote for John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations.