Shocking images of distraught and terrified children, surrounded by police with riot shields, with angry crowds hurling abuse at them as they tried to walk up the road to Holy Cross primary school in Belfast, dominated the news in September 2001. As the story rapidly snowballed, more and more reporters swelled the numbers on the streets and pictures of the appalling scenes were flashed around the world until the events of September 11 knocked them abruptly from the news agenda.

Holy Cross attempts to look behind those headlines and news images to give an insight into the emotions, motivations and actions of those involved.

Executive producer Robert Cooper explains, “Obviously it’s a very sensitive subject and we were clear from the outset that what we didn’t want to do was make a drama which simply re-enacted the horrors. We felt very strongly that it wasn’t worth doing unless we could provide some insight into why people acted in the way they did and what it was like to be in that situation, faced with those incredibly difficult and extraordinary decisions. We wanted to ask the questions: ‘Why would you go and stand on a line and scream abuse at children?’ and ‘why would you, as a parent, choose to take your children through that abuse?’”

Reports at the time repeatedly used the phrase ‘the naked face of sectarian hatred’ to describe what was happening. But director Mark Brozel believes that this enabled those outside the conflict to distance themselves from it, because it ignored the fact that many people caught up in the dispute were not sectarian. “News tends to tell stories in a very black and white way. On one level it’s great because it tells us what is happening, but day-in, day-out it also desensitizes us to the pain and experiences of the individuals involved. What a drama like Holy Cross can do is give people a really strong emotional connection with what people actually go through.

“We weren’t in any way trying to justify the abuse that was heaped on those young school-girls” continues Brozel. “But we wanted to show the pressures and tensions that spilled out onto the street and get closer to recognising that the people involved are just that - not monsters or demons, but people.

“One of the reasons that people can be frightened of a film like this is because they are worried that the road to understanding leads to condoning what they regard as appalling behaviour but it’s only through understanding that we can make sense of the world we live in. Once you demonise or dehumanise people then it becomes all right to push them aside – that’s the kind of sentiment that takes you onto a line to scream at five-year-old girls. What this film shows is the cost of demonisation. It’s relevant to any situation in the world where there is acute conflict”

Holy Cross paints a picture of two ordinary families who live back-to-back but whose lives are led on opposite sides of an insurmountable divide. The story is told through the eyes of two young girls who, in any other town, could be good friends. Because of the situation in Ardoyne and Glenbryn they don’t even know each other’s names.

On one side of the interface lives Siobhan (Emma Whyte), a pupil at Holy Cross, with her younger sister Aoife (Lauren McDonald), mother Ann (Zara Turner), father Gerry (Colum Convey) and older brother Tony (Henry Deazley). On the other side is Karen (Louise Doran) who attends the Protestant Wheatfield Primary School, opposite Holy Cross. She lives with her mother Sarah (Bronagh Gallagher) and Uncle Peter (Patrick O’Kane).

Holy Cross takes as its starting point an incident over a flagpole outside the Holy Cross school in June 2001 which is acknowledged by both sides as the spark for the dispute. The drama includes actual news footage from the time and shows the effects of the ensuing violence on both families as tension builds over the summer and a crisis is reached when the children go back to school. Siobhan and Aoife face the terror of walking through the lines of angry Glenbryn residents, and see their father’s life threatened. At home they witness the collapse of their parent’s marriage, and of the relationship between their father and older brother. Karen, for her part, watches in horror and shame as first her uncle then her mother are drawn into the protest.

The script was based on exhaustive research. Writer Terry Cafolla suggests there are “almost always two truths where this dispute is concerned, as people from either side of the community are so embedded in their beliefs that their version of events becomes the truth. Many incidents are claim and counterclaim with no other witnesses. What happened, happened because there are two communities with very different points of view and each side is unwilling to acknowledge the other’s viewpoint. Feelings run so deeply on both sides it was inevitable that when the trigger point was reached, the results would be explosive, and that is what we have tried to show.”

Many residents on both sides of the divide had been left with a lasting suspicion of the media and were initially reluctant to talk to the programme-makers. “The main difficulty was to try and convince the people involved that we were trying to be honest to the stories and not coming to it with an agenda, and in Northern Ireland that’s very hard,” explains producer Jonathan Curling. “Many people are still bitter about how they were represented at the time and in many ways the media became part of the problem during the dispute.” Notwithstanding, the team spoke to many individuals and groups on both sides of the divide, all research was undertaken in the strictest of confidence.

Spending time with families from both sides of the interface, Brozel gained more understanding of how people can become locked into their own version of events. “I found my sympathies being turned on and off like a light - spending time with one family you see the world from their point of view and then when you go to the other side you feel it from their perspective. So if I find it difficult to rationalise what’s going on, how much more difficult must it be for people who are caught up in it”.

Cooper was profoundly affected by the level of fear that people on both sides live their lives in. He explains, “We wanted to put across to a wide audience what it is like to live your life in fear, fear that events outside could threaten you in your own home – that your windows could be broken, that your house could be targeted, that a riot outside could spill over into your sitting room – what does that do to your head if it happens night after night? How does that make you feel about the people across the other side of the divide? Does it help us understand why people end up doing things that as outsiders are beyond our comprehension?”

Curling says: “Holy Cross takes the child’s view of parents caught up in a terrible cycle of hatred and violence. It’s about the tragedy of young kids born into sectarianism and what they suffer as a consequence. They are innocent enough still to see it for what it really is.”

Holy Cross is the latest in a line of powerful dramas from BBC Northern Ireland's drama department which reflect life in Northern Ireland. From Pulling Moves, Pearse Elliott's 10-part series set in West Belfast which will be screened on BBC Three early next year and Gary Mitchell's recently screened As The Beast Sleeps, through popular series work by acclaimed Northern Irish and Irish writers such as Stewart Parker, William Trevor, Anne Devlin, Frank McGuinness, Ali White, Colin Bateman and Ronan Bennett, to the Billy plays by Graham Reid in the late 70's. Other recent highlights from BBCNI include Messiah, Sinners, Murphy’s Law (with Tiger Aspect) and soon-to be screened Gunpowder, Treason and Plot (with Box TV) by Jimmy McGovern.