And they filled places one, two and three. The richest part of Belfast, the Malone Road now has a Catholic majority. Across the city, at least 75% of the Victorian red-brick villas in the leafy avenues leading off the upper Antrim Road are owned by Catholics. They drive big cars and have holiday homes, many in Donegal, and are jetting off to exotic locations where they dine and play golf alongside their fellow arriviste multi-millionaires from the Republic.

Drive along the Lisburn Road and check out the boutiques and cafes. High-end retail is booming. In the city centre, the jewellers, Lunn's, has gone from one to three stores, the latest in the spectacular new Victoria Square centre. Jigsaw, the top-end UK ladies fashion chain, which closed its Dublin store in 2006, has just opened nearby and is reported to be doing very nicely. Want to see the rich living it big? Check out the annual Waterloo Ball charity bash organised by the Lord Taverners in Belfast. They flew in Bryan Ferry this year. Top of the raffle list is one of the last remaining De Loreans.

Hold on a second. Isn't Northern Ireland supposed to be, er, depressed, like, after three decades of terrorist violence? Aren't the Catholics supposed to be 'oppressed' like Gerry Adams keeps banging on about? Bertie Ahern certainly thought so when he gave £580m to build roads. Incidentally, if it does go to road building, the bulk of it will go to very rich Catholics who dominate the construction industry in the North.

A Belfast property professional, interviewed to ascertain just how well Catholics are doing in the North rhymed off a string of Catholics whose fortunes he put in the "hundreds of millions". He had heard recently that 13 private jets were on order for customers here. The majority, he said, were ordered ... that's right, by Catholics.

So why do an awful lot of people in the '26 counties', as Sinn Fein continue to refer to the Republic, still believe the myth about Catholics being 'oppressed' in the North? Many people still adhere to the strange belief that they are a kind of northwest European version of the Palestinians.

What did Bobby Sands kill himself for anyway? Was it so that his fellow northern Catholics could own jets? Drive Beemers?

Bobby would be especially bewildered by what has happened to his fellow Provos. They've let him down big time, poor schmuck. Most of them have moved up the economic ladder, and out of the oppressed 'ghettos'. Your average west Belfast Provo now lives in one of the new private housing developments that have sprung up in the past 20 years on the western outskirts of the city. One of the most popular with the Lads is the area where Sinn Fein MLA and former bomber, Gerry Kelly lives.

And a funny thing about the rich Provos is this: they are still looked down on by the Middle Class Catholics (MCCs).

When the Provos started buying holiday homes in Donegal, they targeted the lower half of the county. Around Glenties, where IRA tout Denis Donaldson was shot dead in his holiday home, is popular. Gerry Adams doesn't much care to rub shoulders with the rank and file and has his holiday gaff a little further north, at Gortahork, a place much favoured in the past by the Belfast middle-class Catholics.

The Belfast MCCs congregate further north. They drive there via the M2. Marks & Spencer has located a new food-only outlet just before John Hume Bridge over the Foyle to cater for them, when they stop off on their way to Donegal for the weekend.

The MCCs are, like middle classes anywhere, smug: they love to make jokes at the expense of their social inferiors. They even have a witty quip about the holiday-home class demarcation in Donegal. The Sinn Fein voters whose cottages are in the south of the county drink their lager in 'Costa del Provo'. The middle classes chill out and sip their M&S wine in 'SDLP sur Mer'.

The Shinners may now have loadsamoney, big motors and holiday homes, but they are still social death. You move to Malone ward in Belfast not only to ascend the social ladder but, more importantly, to get the hell away from west Belfast and the Provos.

Malone votes for three parties: the SDLP, Ulster Unionists and Alliance, usually in that order. There is apparently a handful of votes for the Shinners, a cause of great amusement at dinner parties. On the Malone, they call it the 'Tiocfaidh ar la-di-da vote'.

The most ambitious and the group that most hates Sinn Fein in the MCC scene is the less rich mob: the young aspiring professionals and those in mid-ranking civil service jobs. They occupy the smaller houses on the avenues that stretch away — but not too far away — from the mansions on the Malone and Antrim roads. They dream of large piles on Malone Park. This mob is as ferociously anti-Shinner as Paisleyites, but for different reasons, of course.

In the last general election, Gerry Adams had apparently convinced himself that this Catholic social stratum was ready to embrace his great love and leadership. The Shinners poured massive resources into Belfast South in the 2005 election. The growth of the Catholic middle-class vote in south Belfast meant that the seat went, for the first time, to an SDLP candidate, Dr Alastair McDonnell.

Sinn Fein candidate Alex Maskey came fourth. Gerry, baby: Middle Class Catholics define their social position primarily through the distance between themselves and you and your voters. If you live in a part of Belfast that has a street sign in both Irish and English, any self-respecting MCC would cross the road to avoid you.

The story is the same in Foyle and south Down — the other two Westminster constituencies where the SDLP was returned. In the last local government elections in 2005, there was a tussle between Sinn Fein and the Green Party for one of the last seats in South Down. The Greens won. In short, you can easily spot rich Catholic areas in the North at election time. They vote SDLP.

Recently, the MCCs have been in revolt over Sinn Fein Stormont Education Minister Caitriona Ruane's attempts to abolish academic selection for 11-year-olds. Lefties and Sinn Fein hate the 11-plus, but the Catholic middle class got where they are today because they were smart and determined and went to exceptional secondary schools. Grammar schools such as St Malachy's on the Antrim Road gets near-as-makes-no-difference 100% of its A-level students into third level. Twenty or 30 pupils a year from St Malachy's go to Cambridge or Oxford. And, of course, St Malachy's is, more or less, free. Those damned Brit-oppressor taxpayers pick up the tab. The poshest girl's school in Belfast, Victoria College (twinned with Rathdown in Glenageary in South County Dublin) does have fees, around £370, or about a twelfth of Rathdown's. Of course, the posh Catholics are also sending their children in larger numbers to the post-Protestant/state grammars such as Royal Belfast Academic Institution, Belfast Royal Academy, Methodist College and Victoria.

While the Catholic middle class flourishes, the Protestants aren't having such a good time. They feel oppressed now. Their sons and daughters tend to go to university in Scotland and England — and afterwards, they inevitably stay there. They don't like Queen's in Belfast because it's full of rough Sinn Fein-supporting country types who get drunk and play hurling with each other at night in flatland. The Belfast journalist, David McKittrick (working-class Prod from Shankill married to nice middle-class Catholic girl) last year made famous a new acronym that describes the flight of these young middle-class Protestants — NIPPLES (Northern Ireland Protestant Professionals Living in England and Scotland).

Ok, enough of the good life of the MCCs. What about those who haven't made it? What's it actually like living in a Catholic working-class ghetto? It's sh*te, according to people who live there and the social workers and academics who study them. In Belfast, there are 83,000 'income-deprived' people, and an awful lot of them are Prods. Eight out of the 10 most deprived electoral wards in Northern Ireland are in Belfast. Nine of the 10 worst 'health-deprivation' wards are in Belfast. Belfast is now 47.2% Catholic and 48.6% Protestant, so you can guess at the maths. Maybe the income deprivation is a bit higher on the Catholic side because the Protestants have been moving out of the city to places like east Antrim where they are in a big majority.

The peace process created an incredible number of 'community' jobs, which have proved a haven for ex-terrorists. A study by Ulster University found recently that there are 30,000 'community workers' in Northern Ireland. But, nonetheless, west Belfast, Ardoyne and West Bank in Derry have gone down the plughole. These are the social and economic models of a Sinn Fein-dominated society. They are like a German Democratic Republic on the dole, and on dope.

Adams and his mates have largely decamped. On March 14 this year, Gerry was living it big in New York with his new best buddies, multimillionaire CEOs of companies such as bankers and sub-prime mortgage operators, Mutual of America and Lehman's, at Bobby Van's on 54th Street, the steak house frequented by Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack.

Later that same evening, back home in the heart of west Belfast, Frank 'Bap' McGreevy, a 51-year-old ex-IRA prisoner, well-known and liked in the community, was beaten to death in his home. A TV was smashed over his head as he lay unconscious in his flat in the lower Falls. Bap was one of the IRA people who didn't cash in on the peace process. Years ago, the Provos would simply have kneecapped the trouble-causing youngsters, but since getting into Stormont they have had to stop the punishment beatings and shootings. The Shinners can no longer blame the Brits or the 'Black B*****ds' in the RUC/PSNI now that they have signed up to policing and the British Army has left for sunnier war zones. Drink-and drug-fuelled joyriders and thugs are making life a misery and there are no IRA goon squads to break their legs any more. The Shinners set up a community restorative justice scheme — paid for by them Brit taxpayers — but it has been useless.

In the past year, two other local men have also been murdered as crime and drug-taking have spiralled out of control here. Harry Holland, another decent and popular ex-republican, was stabbed to death as he tried to stop youths stealing his van from outside his grocery shop. Another man was killed in a machete and hatchet attack at his home off the Falls Road. In any other constituency in the UK, you might expect the local political leadership to come in for some kind of criticism. But Sinn Fein has turned west Belfast into an old-fashioned, GDR-style fiefdom and no criticism of the Great Leader is allowed. What Adams and no one else expected was an attack from inside his own backyard. After the murder of Bap McGreevy, The Andersonstown News, ran an anonymous column attacking Adams and his rich pals for abandoning the area to hoods and scumbags. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The newspaper owner and Adams devotee, Mairtin O Muilleoir (a former Sinn Fein councillor who was present at Bobby Van's in New York and wrote up Adams's lunch with the CEOs on his blogsite) must have been equally shocked. In the next edition, the 'Andytown' carried a front-page reply from Adams denouncing the article as "offensive and hurtful" and a suitably grovelling apology from the editor and presumed author of the offending article, Robin Livingstone.

So there you have it: rich Catholics living in Brit-supported paradise. Poor Catholics living in Sinn Fein-dominated hell. Neither wants a united Ireland. And, incidentally, just in case Mr Cowen was thinking about it, the South really couldn't afford to keep them.