Belfast Offers Daily Lessons in Mayhem : Northern Ireland: Real life drama is far more chilling, life-threatening than the make-believe on the silver screen.

The audience found the film “Dead Again” scary enough. But the real life drama going on outside the cinema was far more frightening.

As the crowd trooped out, chattering about the chilling film directed by and starring Belfast actor Kenneth Branagh, the horror of the Northern Ireland conflict quickly confronted them all.

The Irish Republican Army had just planted a car bomb down the street, in the heart of Belfast. The car was parked across the road, its emergency parking lights still blinking.

A young couple in evening dress ran for their lives. A policeman wearing a bullet-proof jacket scurried across with white tape to close off the road, shouting “Disappear fast” to those tempted to gawk at the scene.

One local resident, typically phlegmatic after 22 years of conflict, nearly 3,000 deaths and 30,000 people injured, said: “You are best to clear out. I have known the axle from one of those cars to land three blocks away. Who needs to go to the cinema to be frightened, eh?”

Within half an hour British army bomb disposal experts had defused the detonator with “a controlled explosion.” So precise was their work that not a single window was shattered in nearby shops.

The IRA launched a year-end bombing blitz as part of its guerrilla campaign to oust Britain from Northern Ireland.

Thirty people were injured in a string of car bomb attacks in Belfast’s city center that recalled the bloody days of the 1970s when the conflict was at its height.

Britain, alarmed by the upsurge in violence, put nearly 2,000 extra troops on the streets of Northern Ireland.

In chatting to a London “cabbie” or a New York taxi driver, one can get the flavor of the city. Do the same in Belfast and you can sometimes feel the hair rising on the back of your neck.

When I asked one driver to take me to the police Castlereagh interrogation center, he remarked: “I know it well. I’ve been in there enough times.”

“Why is that?”

“On a murder charge--it was a British soldier.”

He had another tale to tell. While working as an ambulance driver he was shot by the “Shankill Butchers,” a gang of Protestant killers whose favored method was usually slitting the throats of their Catholic victims.

“One of the gang shot me when I went to pick up a patient and I was blasted out of the ambulance,” he said, recalling the attack in a matter-of-fact voice.

Taxi drivers are now a favorite soft target for Protestant extremists. Drivers fear that their next fare could be their last.

When a passenger asked to be picked up outside the headquarters of the Ulster Defense Assn., a self-styled Protestant militia, the taxi driver told him: “Don’t be late. I am not hanging about. I could get hijacked.”

The conflict has given rise to black humor in Northern Ireland.

One recent Tuesday Belfast was plunged into chaos by a string of IRA bomb alerts across the city. Traffic was snarled and irate passengers were trying to talk their way into the train station to catch the next express to Dublin.

A suspect van had been left outside the station entrance. The all too familiar white tape was up again.

What was going on? A soldier just shrugged his shoulders apologetically and said: “The bomb hoaxes are normally on Thursday to coincide with late-night shopping. The IRA must have got muddled with the time change to winter.”