OPINION:A 34-YEAR-OLD former UDA "brigadier", Ihab Shoukri , died last weekend after what seems to have been a night of heavy drug-taking, and a life distorted by a grotesque effort to belong, writes Fionnuala O'Connor.
For his jailed younger brother André and himself, growing up the children of an Egyptian sailor father in Belfast's loyalist Westland Road brought racist abuse.
The allegedly quieter, shyer Ihab did comparatively well at Lagan integrated secondary school before the two boys bulked up on steroids and became loyalist paramilitaries.
One-time henchmen of the disgraced and exiled Johnny Adair - "the Pakis", Adair liked to call them.
Shoukri's was not the only untimely death in the North in a bad 24 hours.
A total of five young men died with horrific suddenness. They had little in common, though the circumstances of their deaths said much about a society evolving with patchy success.
In the past such a death-toll in a weekend would have suggested paramilitary murders. Peacetime has seen road death totals accelerate, like much of the driving.
The crash that killed four Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) officers before dawn on Sunday came as they sped to help colleagues in Rostrevor, attacked while trying to arrest a suspected drunk driver by an "unruly mob", in the words of Police Federation chairman Terry Spence.
Rostrevor is a lovely hillside town, mainly Catholic, as yet incompletely converted to support for policing - especially late on a Saturday night and the early hours of Sunday, at pub-closing time. Not all that much different from many parts of Ireland, and Britain too, if truth be told.
The distinction is that arresting officers in the North are liable to sudden deadly attack from the dregs of unregenerate republican paramilitarism, focused now, as a last throw, on trying to scare Catholics away from membership of or support for the PSNI.
The four trapped in their burning reinforced Shogun alongside peaceful Carlingford Lough were in life a text-book example of the new service's recruitment across different backgrounds.
Reaction to their deaths testified to that, much as the cavalcade of 29 people killed by the Real IRA's Omagh bombing unified a splintered North in grief because they were so diverse - including unborn twins and a Spanish child and teacher.
The News Letterdescribed the dead officers as "living embodiment of the new policing dispensation in the province. Avid Gaelic footballers died alongside their Orangeman colleague".
The Irish Newsgave eight news pages to coverage of the crash, including accounts of multiple RUC fatalities both on the road, and at the hands of the IRA - who once killed nine when they bombed a prefab canteen.
The News Letterwas inclined to see insensitivity in Sinn Féin reactions, which began with comments from Martin McGuinness, Deputy First Minister and former IRA leader, who called the crash an "appalling tragedy" and said the community had "walked behind too many coffins".
Would he attend any of the funerals, the News Letterasked, though it neglected to ask the same question of First Minister Peter Robinson.
The News Letterreported that a Sinn Féin spokesman said the Deputy First Minister had "no personal relationship" with any of the total of seven people killed on Northern roads in weekend crashes, and had repeated that seven had been killed "and not four".
Even polished public speakers faced with tragedy can get it wrong. New attitudes are there, if there is will to recognise them.
The DUP Co Down MLA Jim Wells said simply: "There won't be a single family in south Down who won't know one of those killed" and gracefully belied his own fundamentalism to speak of prayers in "churches and chapels".
Only the Real and Continuity IRAs could have faulted the Co Down Sinn Féin MLA Willie Clarke who said his thoughts were with the bereaved, the emergency services, the members of the public who tried in vain alongside police would-be rescuers to smash the reinforced windows of the burning police vehicle, and added: "These young officers were serving the community from which they came."
Mainstream republicans can be unbearably smug and will never repent as many would like, but Sinn Féin has left loyalists far behind. The flagrant dissoluteness of the Shoukris and their like has soaked up millions from philanthropy and governments.
Recent research has yet again assessed working-class Protestant boys as among the most educationally disadvantaged. Their desperate need for positive role models was summed up some years back by tireless campaigner in loyalist communities May Blood, a Blair-created baroness.
A boy on the Shankill Road told her he wanted to be an ex-prisoner when he grew up. He knew who had status in his community.
If it scares off even a few boys before they too become lost, the death of Ihab Shoukri might gain some meaning.