At least eight men were involved. The attackers kicked and stamped on the heads of the three men, leaving one with a face so badly smashed it had to be restructured with the aid of steel plates.

Paul's injuries were so bad that when he was found people thought he had been stabbed.

There was blood coming out of his ears and mouth as a result of his attackers stamping on his head and it took ambulance crew nine minutes to resuscitate him.

He was transferred from Altnagelvin to the Royal Victoria Hospital were an emergency operation was carried out to remove a piece of his skull in order to relieve pressure on his brain.

To all extents and purposes Paul Mc Cauley should have died as his attackers had planned. But by the skill of the surgeons and the devotion and prayers of his family and friends, Paul lived but has remained in a coma ever since.

On Friday past, an eighteen year old youth who pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of attempted murder was sentenced to 12 years for the murderous attack on Paul and his two friends. The youth from the unionist Fountain estate in the City, had been arrested a few weeks after the attack. He was then fifteen. One can speculate that the arrest of someone so young was a diversion to let the real attackers, still at large, off the hook.

The McCauley family were never informed that the UDA was responsible until they read an IMC report. It concluded that the attack on Paul Mc Cauley was the culmination of a series of sectarian attacks at that time on the Catholic community in Derry.

With the exception of the fifteen year old stooge, no one has been made amenable for the attacks.

The silence from Unionist politicians and people since the attempted murder of Paul McCauley and his friends by the UDA especially in close knit Unionist communities like the Fountain has been deafening.
Perhaps people are afraid to speak or come forward because they know that the organisation responsible is still heavily armed and has no intention of giving up its illegal weapons.

There is no doubt that working class Unionist communities are drowning in a sea of criminality, drug dealing and terror, for those engaged in such activity believe they are beyond the law. Those who attacked Paul McCauley knew they could do so in the knowledge that they would not be apprehended, thus adding to the grief and suffering of the Mc Cauley family.

They would not have been consoled by the tongue in cheek utterances of the Secretary of State, Shaun Woodward as the British Government issued yet another warning to Unionist paramilitaries that they should decommission their weapons.

In what was almost a plea to the UVF and the UDA and its various pseudo gangs, the security Minister Paul Goggins talked about last chances for these organisations before the British Government would dispense with the services of its highly paid decommissioning body He then went on to give them another lifeline by extending the legislation to enable them to carry on regardless. Even the Conservatives shook their heads in disbelief.

It was another sop to the UDA who in 2005 demanded that the British pay them £70 million to enable them to stop killing Catholics. Handing over guns was never part of the secret talks between high ranking British Government officials.

Nor has the intervention of the PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde in the talks persuaded the armed organisations to go down the path of legality even with the promise of mega bucks and no prosecution for past activity.

The molly coddling and conciliatory approaches of the British Government to the various Unionist paramilitary organisations that refused to hand over one bullet is in sharp contrast to the threats and murder attempts on Republicans trying to broker the peace.

But the Republican/ Nationalists community know that the British Government has nurtured, armed and directed Unionist paramilitaries since the 6 County was founded let alone in the past forty years. The problem for the British is that their guns and Government policy can no longer control the Frankenstein monster they created for

Unionist paramilitary leaders are a law unto themselves. Even the current spate of arrests of some members of the notorious Mount Vernon gangs has not allayed the suspicion among the Catholic communities that it is nothing more than a cosmetic exercise designed to divert attention from the reality that the supplementary armies of Unionist paramilitaries encouraged by their British masters, were not going to be stood down by the giving of an order.

The umbilical cord between the British and its illegal armies in the North has never been cut.

Step into the breach those unionist leaders who on more than one occasion have seemingly encouraged Unionist paramilitaries to 'the hold onto your guns boys'.

This pragmatic attitude of the DUP to Unionist paramilitaries can be best summed up by the appearance of Willie McCrea on stage in Portadown alongside Billy Wright, the Unionist LVF leader, nicknamed 'King Rat' who is reputed to have murdered at least twenty nine people, before he himself was gunned down while in prison. McCrea had already been criticised for allegedly trying to discourage the LVF from decommissioning its weapons.

Jeffrey Donaldson's announcement in Westminster that the DUP would be meeting with representatives of the UDA and the UVF has more to do with their failure last year to affect an end game to the activities of the paramilitaries outlined in another damning report by the IMC. That politics is not working in Unionist working class areas, controlled by the paramilitaries is evident by the level of drug dealing and criminality.

In 2006, some four months before the murder attempt on Paul Mc Cauley, Peter Robinson and Nigel Dodds met with the Loyalists Commission the umbrella group for the UDA, UVF and the Red Hand Commandos. The purpose as stated by the DUP leaders was' to end criminality and paramilitary activity'; a purpose echoed this week by Jeffrey Donaldson.

That their efforts to persuade Unionist paramilitaries to depart from their military and criminal activity has met with little success, may be due in part to the relationship between some members of the DUP and the blood thirsty groups they now hope to convert to law and order.

While Jeffrey Donaldson may claim that the DUP do not want to give credibility to Unionist paramilitary groups, their own credibility as serious negotiators has been compromised by such past associations.

The British Army and the RUC trained, armed and directed the UDA in its sectarian campaign of murder during the dirty war in the North. That's why those who carried out the attempted murder of Paul McCauley and his friends will not be made amenable to the law as it stands. The UDA know they are beyond the reach of that law.

The tragedy is that another generation of impressionable young Protestants are being sucked in with the blood thirsty thugs who have destroyed the life of a young man simply because of his religion.