The British government and its agencies in Northern Ireland get most of the blame from the Shankill residents of Belfast for the recent trouble. But many others are believed to be complicit.
"The media are making us look like scum, and we're not scum. We are a people crying out for help. The media did more for Johnny Adair's image than anyone else because you just hyped him up and put him on a pedestal to look up to," claims one resident.
Others believe that broadcasters were unfair to Protestants when doorstepping Belfast Orange Order chief Dawson Bailie and recording his remarks about the order being blame-free for the trouble. They say he was "jumped" and "hijacked" and "made look foolish". The same wouldn't have happened to "slick Sinn Féiners".
One resident comments: "I've no problem with the police doing away with paramilitarism or sectarianism. But there's a way of doing it and you don't use the Whiterock parade to do that."
Another adds: "It's very easy when kids are out rioting and tempers are flaring and there's an adrenalin rush, very easy for the big boys [ paramilitaries] to appear and say to them 'join us'."
"The police are a political organisation now, unfortunately," says builder Sam Robertson, from the loyalist Woodvale area in the Shankill. "If Johnny Adair was in Northern Ireland now and his C Company [ of the UFF] started murdering people today, somebody will be on the news telling us that C Company murdered that person. But if a pro-Belfast Agreement group, namely the Provisional IRA or any of the so-called loyalist groups, were to murder somebody, the police would say they are keeping an open mind on it. That's corruption. [PSNI chief constable] Mr Orde's a political animal, not a policeman."
The growth in Catholic confidence and the electoral rise of Sinn Féin prompts particular alarm. "The difference between the Protestant community and the Catholic community is that whenever a Protestant paramilitary bombed somewhere or shot anyone, the Protestant community never voted for them," says one Shankill resident. "They might have thought 'well, the other people deserved it, sort of', but they never voted them into government.
"Unfortunately, the Catholic community were only too happy to vote for people who blew up men and women and primary-school kids in a fish shop down the Shankill, which astounded right-thinking people. Our people generally never supported an act of violence. They might have turned a blind eye to it, but they would never have supported the people doing it. You were treated as a pariah for defending your community. Now the people are thinking, 'well, it's about time' - and that's scary."