Seven young men ordered to leave within the space of three days. It may be big news at the moment but it's nothing extraordinary in Northern Ireland. In fact, it happens every day.
Since the signing of the Belfast Agreement 16 months ago, 757 young people have been exiled by the Provisional IRA and loyalist paramilitaries. They don't normally merit even a paragraph in local newspapers but now they're front-page material in the British national dailies.
That's largely because of Dr Mo Mowlam's controversial decision that the Provisional IRA ceasefire was still intact despite strong evidence to the contrary from her own security advisers.
The decision to expel the young men so quickly after the Provisionals had escaped with a yellow card was not intended as a deliberate slap in the face for the Northern Secretary. It was just "business as usual".
The Provisionals were doing what they always do - putting the needs of their own organisation before everything else and maintaining their stranglehold on the working-class nationalist community.
The beatings, shootings and expulsions have actually risen with the peace process. In 1995, the first full year after the ceasefires, the number of "punishment" attacks by the Provisional IRA increased fourfold - from 32 in 1994 to 141.
The number by loyalists doubled from 38 to 76. Some observers found it strange that at a time of "peace", paramilitaries should increase their violence against their own communities. There was nothing illogical about it.
With the ceasefires, both sets of paramilitaries abandoned attacks against their previous targets. The Provisionals stopped killing RUC officers and British soldiers and carrying out bomb attacks on commercial and security targets. The UVF and the UDA stopped shooting Catholics.
However, none of the paramilitary groups was willing to fade into oblivion. They all want their organisations to remain intact. They see continuing "punishment" attacks as a way of keeping their machinery well oiled, ensuring old members remained "on board" and attracting new ones.
"Punishment" attacks are a means of retaining control in their own areas. Vincent McKenna of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Bureau says they are also a product of internal politics: "They keep hardliners within the para militaries busy and stop them asking awkward questions about where the peace process is heading. If members are busy with these attacks, they have less time to wonder what their leaders are up to."
Although the assaults are carried out by grassroots activists, they have the approval of the upper echelons. The leadership sees it as a form of occupational therapy for the rank-and-file.
Mr McKenna has also noted that Provisional IRA attacks have become more savage. Hurleys were once the favoured instrument, now it's iron bars and hammers. "They want to hear bones crush," he says. Some long-standing republicans attribute this to the Provisionals having attracted some very savage individuals in recent years.
"They came in after 1994 when it was much safer to join. We call them post-ceasefire soldiers. They can be very brutal. All they've ever done is beat up teenagers. Many of them seem to enjoy it."
With "punishment" shootings, it's no longer a case of the Provisionals aiming a low-calibre weapon at a kneecap, Mr McKenna says. The victim could expect to recover relatively quickly from that type of attack.
"The Provos are now using heavy calibre weapons and aiming at the shin bones and the sides of the knees. They're shooting the joint right out and no amount of surgery is going to put it back together."
Mr McKenna claims the British government is prepared to turn a blind eye to these activities providing the Provisionals aren't shooting British soldiers or RUC officers or bombing England.
"The British government seems not to care who is being shot, beaten or expelled in the ghettoes of Northern Ireland so long as the Provos aren't bombing Canary Wharf. If the price for no attacks on the mainland is the lives and liberty of working-class teenagers in Northern Ireland, it is a price they are prepared to pay."
The Provisional IRA in particular believes it has the right to "police" its own areas. Its targets are drug-dealers, those involved in petty crime such as stealing cars and burglary, police informers, republican dissidents and anyone critical of the political direction of the Sinn Fein leadership.
An increasing number of attacks are also motivated by personal grudges. Andrew Kearney bled to death in a lift in north Belfast last year. He was shot because he had fought with a leading local Provisional.
His killing proved very unpopular in nationalist areas and his family received hundreds of messages of sympathy and support.
However, many of the expulsions and beatings are accepted by the community because the victims have been involved in petty crime. The paramilitaries deal with "offenders" much more brutally than the police. The "accused" have no right of defence or appeal. A crime which would normally lead to three months imprisonment by the courts can end in the "offender" being crippled for life or exiled from their home indefinitely.
However, one Belfast community worker, who asked not to be named, said: "The reality is that the Provos wouldn't get away with it if there wasn't a level of support for many of these attacks. If they were beating and shooting totally innocent kids, the community wouldn't stand for it, but if the individuals concerned have been causing trouble for a long time people will think they got their just deserts." Gerard Groogan (18) and his brother Martin (16), two of the Dungannon teenagers ordered to leave the North last weekend, admitted taking part in house-break-ins to some journalists. They denied accusations of drug-pushing and car-theft.
The local Catholic priest, Father Joe Quinn, who notified the boys of the death threats, told the Times: "When the news broke in Dungannon, there was a sense of relief, a sense that it was long overdue - not necessarily the severity of the threat but that something should be done because there has been a lot of trouble."
He added: "I am a man who believes in non-violence but this kind of behaviour would not be necessary if we had a police service to deal with this problem and not leave it up to the paramilitaries."
It's a point reiterated by Sinn Fein. Writing in The Irish Times earlier this year, Mr Martin McGuinness claimed the RUC either ignored crime in nationalist areas or else offered criminals immunity from prosecution if they became police informers.
He believed the Patten commission on policing offered hope of changing the situation if it led to the establishment of an unarmed, accountable police force which could win nationalist support.
Even then it seems unlikely that the Provisional IRA will simply step aside. It will surely insist on continuing to play some role in policing nationalist districts.
The Provisionals know if they relinquish control of these areas, they are effectively announcing the demise of their own organisation - and there are no signs that they are prepared to do that.
