Northern Ireland's troubled past is now a must-see for tourists

"Over there is the Protestant area. And there, behind the wall in the middle of the road are the Catholics," says Alan Hoy with a smile as he tells tales of Belfast's hardest working class areas.

His taxi carefully parked on the kerb, Hoy works for one of seven cab firms that now take the curious to north and west Belfast to explain all about what is still euphemistically called around here "The Troubles".

From Crumlin Road, to Shankill, Falls Road and Ardoyne, Hoy's route is well planned. He stops in front of the derelict courthouse in Crumlin Road and the famous jail opposite, which is no longer taking guests of Her Majesty.

He then stops at the main murals painted onto the mish-mash of small brick houses in the fiercely Protestant Shankill area.

Next stop is the Ardoyne, former stronghold of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), where more gable end frescoes celebrate the opposite political point of view.

Northern Ireland went to the polls on March 7 but Hoy says despite the peace, Protestant and Catholic children are still educated separately and hatred, intolerance, violence and death persist.

His tour ends by the largest so-called "peace wall", which still separates the two communities along Shankill Road. In the past few months, it has become longer and higher.

"The Germans are jealous of our wall," he jokes, referring to the old Berlin Wall that separated west from east at the height of the Cold War. "You can take pictures. It's safe to walk around."

Locals going about their business don't even look at the visitors. They are used to it.

Each year, thousands of people now visit the areas where the bloody pages of the Northern Ireland conflict were written, says Fiona Ure, from the Belfast tourist office.