By Kevin Connolly BBC Ireland correspondent

A young man is walking home from a pub after a quiet drink with friends.

He is alone, and defenceless, an unarmed civilian.

There has been trouble elsewhere in his home city earlier in the evening, but he lives in Belfast, and it seems these days there's always trouble.

It is so routine, they may not even have been talking about it in the pub.

We will never know what Gerard Lawlor was thinking about on the way home.

Maybe about how his parents were enjoying their holidays down the coast at Newcastle. Perhaps about his plans to set up home with his girlfriend and their baby son.

At some point on his walk home, gunmen in a car or on a motorbike pulled up.

'Unlucky'

They guessed Gerard was a Catholic because he wore a Celtic football shirt under his coat, so they opened fire and he died alone in the street.

It was probably an act of vengeance for the shooting of a young Protestant by republicans a few miles away, a few hours earlier.

Loyalists had made a number of unsuccessful attempts to kill a Catholic over the course of the evening, and this 19-year-old man was unlucky.

Eight years after the first paramilitary ceasefire in Belfast, life can end for you because you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The young man's grieving mother says she will pray for her son's killers, forcing us to consider how we would react if the lives of our children were ended in such a revolting act of random violence.

Not perhaps, for most of us, with such nobility.

John Reid: Meeting with Tony Blair

In those areas of North and East Belfast where hardline Catholic and Protestant communities co-exist side by side, friction can easily lead to rioting, which in turn can lead to paramilitaries on both sides getting the guns out and opening fire.

They of course have agendas of their own, and a determination to keep a grip on the communities they purport to represent - a readiness to use deadly violence is one part of that pattern.

All this at the beginning of the week where Tony Blair and the Northern Ireland secretary John Reid are due to make some sort of pronouncement on the status of the paramilitary ceasefires.

The government declared the UDA ceasefire to be over last year, but it has been under growing pressure from David Trimble's Ulster Unionists to say publicly the IRA has been in breach too, even while its political wing Sinn Fein sits in government.

Sectarian violence

The underlying political reality is Mr Trimble does not want to go into next year's elections to the province's assembly as a man happy to share power with republicans in those circumstances.

He knows Protestant voters - unhappy with the way the process is working out - would be likely to defect to Ian Paisley's more hardline DUP.

A great deal hangs on what the government says although it is unlikely to impose serious sanctions on Sinn Fein since one key aspect of the process has been the British government's engagement with violent republicanism.

Still, whatever Tony Blair has to say, his words will provide no comfort for the family of Gerard Lawlor.

In the Northern Ireland of the peace process, sectarian violence has left another mother broken-hearted, another baby without a father.