People won’t let that happen.” And he is putting his money where his mouth is. Four months ago he moved into the amusements business and ignored the instinct to stay on the Shankill. He opened instead on the fringes of the city centre to attract both Catholics and Protestants. For peace to last he insists “it’s the barriers in our minds we have to bring down”.. She and Samantha, a Protestant girl from Belfast, shared the home of a rich American The subjects of religion and politics were banned. Within days of Aisling’s return, peace had broken out.To Aisling the past six months have meant “no big bangs at the barracks and you don’t have to evacuate your house any more”.Back on the Shankill, a once sceptical Mr Butler believes that the peace will last “I think we’ve come too far to go back. “Daddy, remember that day the potato van blew up and we all had baked potatoes?While Mr Gray, who has been unemployed for 10 years, will hardly leave Ballymurphy, Aisling spent six weeks in the US last year as part of an American-run, cross-community project.

“She can still remember every stitch she was wearing that day,” said Mrs Gray But Aisling, too, has learnt to joke. Aisling still suffers trauma after she and her family were held hostage by republican terrorists when she was just four. They are particularly relieved for their children, Aisling, Anthony, 10 and Roslin, 7, who have all been caught in crossfire. “Time for peace, time to go,” reads the inscription.The Grays have survived the last 25 years by turning personal distress and tragedy into comedy. This week Mrs Gray joked that peace has simply brought a change of persecutor – TV licensing vans are venturing into estates that were once considered no-go areas.Like the Butlers, they say the greatest benefit of the peace has been the relaxed atmosphere. A few streets away, a freshly painted mural shows a comic-looking British squaddie being transported across the Irish sea by a dove. Around Ballymurphy neat slogans demand demilitarisation and the disbanding of the RUC.

“Have you seen them on telly?”Today the television news has delighted the Grays: 400 troops are pulling out of Ulster. She says she “nearly died” the first time she was driven through the heart of the other side’s territory to pick up a patient Now she makes the trip twice a week Without the peace, she would refuse Her friend Anne-Marie thinks she is mad even now “They don’t want peace you know,” she insisted. When his stomach ulcer burst at Christmas he was rushed to hospital in a loyalist part of east Belfast. Mrs Gray, her daughter Aisling, 11, and her sister Angela, 34, roared with laughter as he described again how nervous he had been about entering the area, even as a patient in peacetime.

“He’s lying in the back of the ambulance and I’m trying to get his Sinn Fein T-shirt off,” giggled Mrs Gray.Since peace was declared, Angela, a care worker, has made her first trip to the Shankill for more than 20 years. Sinn Fein supporters, like most of their neighbours, they still believe they need protection from “the other side”.To say that Mr Gray feared Protestants would be a monumental understatement. Outside Mr Gray’s living-room window looms a 15ft brick and metal wall, winding into the distance. It has been completed since the ceasefire.Rising above the ugly RUC barracks, across the road, the new peace line adds to the eyesore but Mr Gray, 33, and his wife Eileen, 37, are happy to have it. “There’s a ceasefire but terrorists are still there,” he said.A mile away in republican Ballymurphy, a few houses from where Gerry Adams was raised, Tony Gray, a father of three, expresses remarkably similar sentiments He cannot believe he will ever walk down the Shankill Road. Yet Mr Butler admitted it would be a long time before he walked the Falls Road. “The Unionist politicians have failed us badly.”Some Catholics have even ventured into the Shankill Road.