When John Paul Thompson was three, he was badly burnt in an accident at his home in Belfast's Ardoyne. When only five, he was adjudged to be in need of counselling and his father and mother began the regular trek into the city for sessions. They continued until he was 10. At 14, while on his way to visit his mother in hospital with gifts of flowers and bath salts, he heard from a casual acquaintance that she was dead. John Paul went missing for two days. On the evening of the funeral, he reversed a stolen car into a bollard and narrowly avoided a child.

His father, left alone to rear four sons and generally acknowledged to be a good and caring man, is believed to have no illusions about his troublesome son. In John Paul, he had a nightmare child, "hyperactive" and addicted to cars, a cause of havoc on the streets and of many parental summonses to the school, frightened of nothing and no-one.

To any objective observer, however, there was more to John Paul's behaviour than ordinary rebelliousness; the child was clearly disturbed. But the IRA's answer was to "exile" him to England.

Within three weeks, he was back at his father's door, undaunted. John Paul is 19 now and last weekend, was "exiled" once again. His story was lost in the focus on the Dungannon cases and he himself seemed to retract his original assertion that the IRA had been involved, while his father was unwilling to talk about it.

Fear can be a powerful silencer but no one is fooled. In places like Ardoyne where the IRA's writ runs, even the infants are aware that no one is beaten, shot or ordered out without its say-so. "I'm goin' to get you done - I'm goin' to the Centre and get you done," squeals one small boy at another during a routine skirmish in their scarred little street - their only available playground.

"They grew up respecting nobody," says Ursula, a young Ardoyne mother and a strong supporter of the peace process. "I know there are some good senior RUC people but I remember ordinary RUC men on the street shouting insults at me like `slut' and `Fenian whore' just because of where I live.

"It was the same with the kids. They grew up with harassment from law and order and followed the example of others who were out there - often encouraged to be out there by the same paramilitaries who are carrying out the so-called punishment beatings and all that now - throwing stones, burning buses and calling people names.

"Their parents were too busy trying to stay alive, always having to think ahead, to get to the shops before they closed early because of a shooting incident, having to cope sometimes with no gas or water or electricity. Even the teachers saw these kids as a lost cause. You tried your best at home but what about the influences outside your door?

"Most of the children from working-class areas - nationalist and loyalist - went through that and it's only in those areas that the paramilitaries have the power to do what they're doing. They have the power because people are afraid, terrified to speak out . . ."

And it is therefore only the working class areas - nationalist and loyalist in equal measure - that are affected by officialdom's blind eye to punishment beatings, murders, shootings and orders into exile, activities characterised merely as "internal housekeeping" matters to the terrorist organisations by the Northern Ireland Office, according to Vincent McKenna of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Bureau.

Easy then, for the middle-classes in turn in their prosperous, politically-mixed suburbs to turn a blind eye for the sake of a kind of peace, effectively ceding the "policing" of the working classes to the power-hungry hardliners.

But less easy as a result to stoke up any outrage about the fascist terrorists and their stranglehold over their own people.

Or to take a closer look at the victims, such as the 80-year-old man shot through the knees and ankles earlier this year after being mistaken for a convicted paedophile or the 13-year-old who suffered a broken arm and fingers after being beaten with baseball bats and told to leave the country.

Or to examine the implications of the increased brutality involved in such "punishments"; for example, where the traditional .22 calibre bullet dislodged the kneecap leaving hope of a complete recovery, the larger calibre .38s and .45s now being used, are aimed at the side of the knee and the shinbone and shatter the joints, often crippling the victim or resulting in amputation.

To live in Northern Ireland is to live with such conundrums. "The situation here is not settled at all; it's only settled on paper," says a Belfast priest. "You have to get it inside the flesh and bones of the people. Peace comes with a mentality. We do not have a normal society here yet. It's like going into a travellers' camp and saying `why don't you live like the rest of us?' Guerrilla war requires unconditional support from the people and with that comes a certain mentality. Even now RUC men will say to someone in trouble here - `You'd better go and see Sinn Fein'."

In Dungannon, that's exactly what the people did. Is it wise to give such power to paramilitaries?

"What does anyone know about it who hasn't had to live with it?", asked a woman from Fairmount Park, home of the Groogan boys, ordered out by the IRA last weekend. "We know the service doesn't come free - that there'll be some loyalty expected in return. But what would you do if you'd been threatened day and night for three or four years with petrol bombs, your kids being spat at, your neighbour beaten near to death, your property destroyed, ransacked or burgled - all by scum who care for no one but themselves?"

Send for the police? Wrong answer. Between them, the four boys ordered out by the IRA - who call themselves The Hoods - have been before the courts about 150 times. Police were often seen "swarming round the estate" looking for them but never seemed to sort out the problem.

"The IRA are getting the power because the police are not fit to do their job," says Patrick Armstrong. "I've seen the hoods standing laughing at them. If you have to send for an unlawful organisation to get things done, well, whose fault is that?"

The Groogan boys and their friends have been away in a young offenders' home. "They called it the `holiday camp'," says a woman, "coming out at weekends with their bus passes and money in their pockets, just laughing at us. I had to laugh when I heard them suggesting that Mo Mowlam should resign. They wouldn't even know who Mo Mowlam is . . ."

How to handle young, male troublemakers and vigilanteism is a universal problem. The difference in the North is that troublemakers can suddenly become international players in a political process, courtesy of a dozen different agendas being played out in the days leading up to the Patten report on the RUC.

Behind a lot of the real and phoney outrage, there will be many around the country this week debating the pros and cons of doling out rough justice to young thugs. A point lost in the arguments is the financial inducement in the North to get your knees shot or limbs broken.

One of the Hoods is rumoured locally to have received £190,000 for a punishment beating. A Dungannon teenager told a Daily Mail journalist that if he got his legs broken in a beating: "I'd be filling my pockets with the compensation."

By some accounts, there was a time when victims of punishment beatings were obliged to surrender a percentage of the compensation to the paramilitaries who carried out the attack. The paramilitaries themselves are hardly shining exemplars of good behaviour or rehabilitation. In Dungannon, two of the IRA individuals who were particularly aggressive towards the Hoods were themselves shot and beaten in the past for anti-social behaviour.

In any event, one Ardoyne mother says that from her observations, such punishments "only make the kids angrier and they get worse - or make them heroes to their peer group and turn them into `wee hard men'."

The irony is that John Paul Thompson is due before the courts in a few weeks on charges of so-called joyriding. It won't be the first time and if convicted, he will probably get a custodial sentence.

"He loves his freedom. Over everything else, the loss of that will set him back on his heels," says a friend.

The IRA could have held their fire.