Last night in the markets area in Belfast a group of "about 20" protestors (I presume that's including the kids) disrupted a DPP meeting in south Belfast designed to give people there a voice and a chance to raise issues with and ask qustions of the police.

They reportedly shouted profanities, "jostled" councillors and decried nationalist politicians for administering a "British police force" administering "imperial rule in Ireland".

Meanwhile, two nights previously, 82-year-old pensioner Jack Cassidy was attacked and robbed in his house just off the Andersonstown Road in west Belfast. A gang of four youths forced their way in to his house on Saint Agnes Drive while he was watching the Northern Ireland football team's victory over Denmark. They "manhandled" the pensioner and urinated in his bed and in every room in his house, before making off with money he had withdrawn the previous day to pay the heating bill and money he'd saved for Christmas presents.

Unsurprisingly the pensioner has said he hopes police will step up the number of patrols in the area. I would imagine the priest also robbed in west Belfast at the weekend, and the two robbed in Cookstown last night, might agree.

Follow up:

So who's really the victim here? A bunch of disaffected children turning their general aggression on a specific target, no doubt being encouraged and manipulated by set-in-their-ways arch-bigots to reject outright any kind of law and order? Just maybe it's the pensioner callously robbed of his savings and the means to pay his bills by a group of thugs who then, for no other reason than their own entertainment, defiled every room in a pensioner's house; the one place we should all have a right to feel safe?

In case they haven't grasped it yet, here's a newsflash for the protestors: it's not unionists who will benefit from effective policing in majority-Catholic areas. There is no conspiracy to subjugate ordinary Catholics to the whim of British imperial might (a term which in itself sounds laughable in this day and age).

Then again, it's fairly clear that these activists really couldn't care less about their community. They're just determined to pick a fight with someone, regardless of who gets hurt. The emphasis must now be on ensuring that the rights of pensioners like Mr Cassidy to feel safe are not ignored because he cannot bully and harass as effectively as these "protestors".