One of the sharpest contrasts in the North is also one of the least visible. Many bereaved by the Troubles still struggle in silence and isolation: the networks sustaining now ageing technicians of violence are like vegetation.
When the much-hyped Historical Enquiries Team set up to reinvestigate more than 3,000 murders have to admit that the RUC managed to lose files on more than 1,000, many campaigners must know their own efforts are all they have.
Scores of organisations for the bereaved and for injured victims have provided at least somewhere to share sorrow. The comparatively small numbers of deaths in recent years have given more prominence to a handful of campaigns than many previously.
New methods, principally the use of the web, relaunched campaigns lost in obscurity, among them the effort by "Justice for the Forgotten" to create interest in the unsolved and scarcely investigated Dublin/Monaghan bombings.
Their campaign is a stoical, sturdy plea against the neglect of 32 years, their website filled with transcripts of contributions to the Oireachtas sub-committee on the Barron report into the bombings but also with accounts and analysis of the bombings and their context.
On the very different sites in memory of the teenager beaten to death in Ballymena this summer, Michael McIlveen, or for Lisa Dorrian, who went missing almost two years ago, postings of loss and reminiscence gain power from adolescent spontaneity. It is also in their nature to lack the solidity of, for example, the Falls Road's Felons Club.
Conspiracy and self-righteousness nourished solidarity. Shedding militarism tested morale and strained credulity but a remodelled camaraderie sustains the IRA's last generation. In the middle of this week's report verifying a thorough-going clean-up was the assertion that it had stood down volunteers and stopped their allowances.
The support groups keep going, mostly staffed by ex-prisoners. A percentage fall through the nets, take to the drink, lose families. To the jaundiced onlooker a step or two away from the busyness of post-paramilitarism, it can all look deluded, pompous. It sustains self-worth for many.
Loyalists are a different story, but even the latter day mess of self-absorption and venality contains a sense of connection that points up the loneliness and separateness that blight many of the bereaved. When veteran UVF lifer-turned-community worker Billy Mitchell died recently, the death notices were more than usually diverse because he built self-help groups and some cross-community contact.
There were tributes from respectable, entirely non-paramilitary groups as well as tributes signed by combinations like "Winkie, Bimbo, Big Rab and Davey Mac"; the Eagle Advice Centre; the East Antrim Conflict and Transformation Forum; Loyalist prisoners in Magilligan and "all those incarcerated across the UK". As "ordinary" crime replaces the last pretences of "defending communities" and the UDA and UVF decay, it becomes steadily less possible to untangle motivation and connections. The fag-end of the Troubles has been hardest on Protestant families mourning relatives killed from within their own community.
Raymond McCord's insistence that the RUC protected his son's murderer because he was an informant in the UVF is due to be massively reinforced by publication of a long-overdue Police Ombudsman's report. Peter Hain has already been trying to dilute the effect by admitting well in advance that it will make "very uncomfortable reading" for the Blair government.
But like the relatives of the Disappeared, the IRA's unburied victims, Mr McCord has had to generate his own support by sheer energy and a persistence few can match. Campaigning for Jean McConville has plainly taken a terrible toll of Helen her daughter and then of her sons. Mr McCord and the families of Jean McConville and Robert McCartney must take what satisfaction they can from the difficulties they have given republicans and loyalists trying to shine up modern images.
There is a sad, understated bleakness about one of the newer campaigns, for the young Craig McCausland, another UVF victim. As the website "Justice for Craig" spells out, he was shot dead in July last year, 18 years after his mother was killed by the UDA. Lorraine McCausland died when Craig was two: he left a two-year old son when he in turn was killed.
There is not even the unease about Craig McCausland's death across any sizeable stretch of the McCausland's community - too diverse and disconnected, loyalist groups long ago detached from wider unionism - that Jean McConville's death leaves among at least some republicans. But the website in Craig McCausland's memory carries photographs of a young man and a young woman decades apart, similarly confident in their best clothes in the best years of their lives, whose destruction left ripples still spreading today.
Memory is a sober counterpoint, as encouragement and flattery oil the wheels of the political process one more time.