NORTHERN IRELAND CEASEFIRE SIX MONTHS ON : How four people's lives have changed over the past six months

It's great to be just a normal casualty unit

Name: Pauline Collins

Occupation: nursing sister

Pauline Collins, 34, was on duty at Belfast's Royal Hospital, in the heart of Catholic west Belfast, the day the IRA bomb devastated the nearby Protestant Shankill Road.

She remembers how busy the casualty department was, as all city hospitals were mobilised to deal with the injured and dying. But 18 months later, the incident is still too raw for detailed discussion. "Not everyone who was brought in survived," she said. "I wouldn't want to upset anyone again by anything I might say. It was very difficult, and of course Greysteel followed."

Mrs Collins stresses that even at the height of the Troubles Belfast was no "war zone". While a steady stream of shootings, bombing and kneecappings meant terrorist-related cases most weeks, they were a small percentage of the workload. It was the sporadic "tit-for-tat" outbreaks, such as Greysteel, which caused medical staff the greatest physical and psychological strain.

"It was always hard to come to terms with the fact that someone would intentionally set out to harm another, but we just got on with our jobs. However, we are human, and it did effect us. Their relatives would be so devastated. Now it's great to be just a normal casualty department."

Mrs Collins's own family was fortunately untouched by 25 years of violence. Colleagues were less lucky. "The peace has taken such a weight off my shoulders. I have two little girls, six and two. It's a relief to be able to take them places without worrying about safety, and to know that my husband can go out and come back in one piece."

"I've grown up with the Troubles. I remember going with my dad to see burning buildings. But I hope that my children won't remember any of this; that it will be no more than history to them. This is such a positive time."

People now come to my shop from all over town

Name: Bernadette Taggart

Occcupation: shopkeeper

Londonderry is a city divided by the river Foyle as effectively as Berlin was by the wall. East of the river is now, bar one beleaguered loyalist estate, exclusively Catholic; west is about half-Protestant, half-nationalist - each community keeping to its own areas, demarcated by flagstones painted red, white and blue or green, white and orange.

According to Bernadette Taggart, who took up a job in an off-licence in the new Rath Mor centre on the Catholic side about a month ago, many people simply did not cross the river from the Waterside, on the East, to shop there.

"This firm has four outlets on this side, in Creggan, Shantallow, Rosemount and Park Avenue," she said. "And as far as I know they have only ever served people from round about. But since I've been working in this new shop this month, people have come in from all over the city.

"I had a woman in from the Waterside the other day. She said she had seen the place at night from across the river and she wanted to investigate. Now that would never have happened without the ceasefire, people just didn't do that sort of thing."

Mrs Taggart puts the very fact she has a job down to the more relaxed atmosphere engendered in the town since the ceasefire. "I was trained as a hairdresser, but I'd not had much work - except occasionally in people's houses," she said.

"Really I was unemployed until this job came along. And would it have come along if people were still frightened? I don't think so."

To live together we must understand each other

Name: George Paton

Occcupation: Orangeman

On Tuesday, at Our Lady and St Patrick's College, in Knock, east Belfast, a meeting of minds took place. It was, perhaps, as significant as Gary McMichael of the loyalist Ulster Democratic Party attending the same function in New York as Gerry Adams.

The college, exclusively Catholic and nationalist, invited George Paton, executive officer of the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland, just as exclusively Protestant and unionist, to address its sixth form. And after an hour of questions and answers, both parties seemed to be enjoying the experience.

"I certainly did," said Mr Paton afterwards. "One of the great problems of Northern Ireland is a lack of mutual understanding. All I was trying to do was to remove some of the myths surrounding Orangism. I wanted to go there and say, this is who we are and this is what we stand for."

This was a view shared by Dermot Mullan, the college's head of history. "We cannot ignore the other tradition," he said. "The whole point of school is to learn, to discover, to find out. And it seems to me, this is what we are doing."

Both were quick to point out that the event was not dependent on the ceasefire. "The impact of the ceasefire has been more to bring the media attention on the initiative," said George Paton. "But I have done this before at other schools, we have been actively taking out our message of what we are and what we stand for during the past couple of years. My impression was that the pupils found it positive.

"This is a small country, if we are going to live together we have to understand one another."

My son could dance in the Christmas lights

Name: Carmel Ferguson

Occcupation: solicitor

Dancing in the Christmas lights at Belfast City Hall meant nothing to Dermot Ferguson, four, but everything to his mother, Carmel, 34. Without the ceasefire she would never have taken him shopping in the city centre in December.

"It had been such a difficult 18 months, with the Shankill bomb, Greysteel and then Loughinisland," says Ms Ferguson, a solicitor in west Belfast. "The violence was so random you began to think you could be a target. To be able to watch Dermot do such an ordinary thing mattered so much."

The cessation of violence has made Ms Ferguson's personal and professional lives easier. On a mundane level, with the four checkpoints on the way to work closed, her journey time has been halved. Mailing is no longer a laborious business of posting every letter individually through the thin bomb-proof slot. To her clients on the Catholic estates of Twinbrook, Poleglass and Andersonstown, she hopes peace brings desperately needed jobs, "ordinary" politics, women's rights. She says the ceasefire has already lifted parents' fears that their children will be sucked into terrorism.

It had been increasingly difficult to explain Ulster's violence in simple terms to her children. Niall, six, would ask: if the guns were bad, why did policemen carry them? Was it OK because they "shoot the baddies"?

"I don't support the IRA," says Ms Ferguson. "But I wouldn't just want to say they were murderers. It is a bit more complicated."

Ms Ferguson, a member of the province's growing Catholic middle class, lives in Protestant-dominated east Belfast. She looks forward to the day her children's names - Niall, Dermot, Maeve - do not attract attention at the local pool, named after the Unionist MP Peter Robinson, and she won't have to change Niall's name to John when approached by a loyalist drunk. "Most people thought they wouldn't see peace in their or their children's lifetime. The ceasefire has given us new hope. It's a lovely feeling."