By Denis Murray BBC Ireland correspondent

Young men, suicide - tough enough. But the last two were heartbreaking.

One young man taking his own life immediately after the funeral of his friend, who had also taken his own life - and both had been the victims of so-called punishment attacks by a republican paramilitary group.

Catholics live side by side with Protestants across Belfast

Now that has certainly been a factor in every case. But another young man who was interviewed anonymously for BBC Radio Ulster said he had been attacked too, and understood completely why the other boys had decided to end it all.

Not all the deaths were connected with the Ardoyne district either, but it is typical of many of the communities in that part of the city.

It's a patchwork of little enclaves of Protestants here, Catholics there, often jammed up against each other with peace walls in between.

This is not a sectarian point, other than to point out the very smallness of such areas. If you live in one, then the boys in the balaclavas with the baseball bats and the guns know where you live.

Street justice

The cause of some of this is complex. In hardline loyalist and republican areas (which most of these are), to be seen to co-operate with the police is highly dangerous.

Nobody "touts" - gives information to the police - and a sad truth is that often the local community will go to the paramilitaries to "correct" young tearaways.

In effect, illegal organisations enforce "street law" with "street justice".

And they do it with the baseball bats and the guns.

Add into the mix deprivation, lack of hope and jobs, and many young fellas get into glue, blow or drink.

Then that has to be paid for with theft, or other crime. And all described by the mouthpieces for the paramilitaries with the euphemism "anti-social behaviour".

Alienation

I don't know the histories of the two latest victims, but one at least was described by his mother as "no angel", but not as bad as the scum, the bullyboys who'd attacked him.

So what you get is a climate of fear, a breakdown in the normal rules of society, self-appointed vigilantes, a police almost powerless to help because of those factors and an alienation from everything that governs the lives of the vast majority, a society within society.

Suicide among young men in Northern Ireland is the highest in the UK (though not as high as in the Republic of Ireland), and cuts across all classes and creeds.

However, this week the spotlight has been thrown on the despairing young men of North and West Belfast who are driven to commit suicide - as a clinical psychologist said: the ultimate destruction.