While out on a job a few years ago a child on a bike, curious as to why a load of people with cameras were invading his space, asked me what I was doing. I told him I was reporting for the Irish News and he said "that's a Taig paper, what are you doing here?"
He wasn't being aggressive just stating as fact that I was from one side of the community and, unusually in his young mind, standing in territory 'owned' by the other side.
That child was born well after the optimistic hope that came with the Good Friday Agreement and the paramilitary ceasefires. His life should be free of such tribal mentality and yet it wasn't, and that is because since the start of the peace process there has been an appalling neglect and denial of the causes of sectarianism.
At an Ulster fry breakfast event in Manchester on Tuesday morning there was an exchange between Sinn Féin leader Michelle O'Neill when she stated 'the North is not British', swiftly followed by the DUP leader Arlene Foster telling the audience 'Northern Ireland is British'.
In south Belfast last week four Catholic families were forced to flee their homes after a threat.
Sinn Féin blamed the UVF, loyalists have denied this is the case.
While the word of the UVF wouldn't hold a up in court as a credible defence, the same group have claimed responsibility for some pretty horrendous acts in the past and so why not this?
Instead it seems more likely that there are elements within that area who are opposed to shared housing and don't want a Catholic about the place.
And that raises a much more profound issue, and one that is not as easily explained away as just singling out paramilitaries as though they are alien from the communities they operate in.
The pushing out of Protestant families from areas that have demographically changed to nationalist has been much more subtle and protracted, but nonetheless all part of the same sectarian segregation.
We are a divided community. Recent electoral results show that rather than moving into the centre ground we are becoming more polarised than at any time since the signing of the peace accord.
Political leaders cannot even agree on the name of the place they are elected to rule, the north or Northern Ireland, British or Irish and identifying as one side or the other is what perpetuates segregation and in turn sectarianism.
Together Building a United Community (TBUC), is a lovely title for a wonderful aspiration but an aspiration is exactly what it is.
Shared housing is something that happens organically, and is more commonly confined to the middle classes where wealth negates the requirement for social housing and therefore where you live is a choice made on lifestyle rather than need.
Shared social housing is a forced reality and one that requires more than taking those at the top of a housing waiting list and plonking them alongside each other in the hope that they will forget generations of sectarianism and fear.
And so why are we surprised when ordinary people, who have been told to vote for one side to keep the other side out, don't want to live next door to the very people they have been conditioned to fear.
What happened Cantrell Close is a symptom of the larger sectarianisation of society, it was a social experiment that went wrong and as a result left four families, including a young pregnant mum, without a home.
Politicians cannot speak out of both sides of their mouths, spouting the virtues of TBUC while telling voters the other side will erode the fabric of society if they don't vote tribally, condemning paramilitarism while posing for pictures alongside those groups' leaders.
The failure of the political process is what has ultimately caused Cantrell Close. Blaming the bad men in balaclavas is a much more palatable reality than addressing the real issue which is political failure.
And until the leaders of unionism and nationalism can share an Ulster fry without disagreeing about where and what Ulster actually is, then we will remain as entrenched and divided as ever.
