Dancing in the streets: young girls in the Beechmount area of Belfast gather excitedly for their first communion.

THERE is a lane running behind Margaret and Joe McMullan's terraced house.

In daylight it is a popular short cut on the Beechmount estate, at night it is known locally as Dead Man's Alley.

The McMullans are matter of fact about it. They have to be. Nobody speaks out of line in this warren of streets off Belfast's Falls Road. If someone was dragged up Dead Man's Alley you might have seen it or you might have heard it, but by the morning it never happened.

The couple were brought up by their parents in this area and, in turn, brought up six children together in Beechmount Crescent. Today they have moved away, one - Joe Jnr - to England in 1989 never to visit home again.

The McMullans have seen violence and death at frighteningly close quarters, and perhaps more than most they have a right to long for peace and to celebrate the overwhelming Yes vote in Northern Ireland.

But like most households in the north yesterday, you wouldn't find Mr and Mrs McMullan in jubilant mood. They have seen too much to raise a toast to peace just yet, just like their neighbours beyond the Peace Line in the Protestant Shankhill area of west Belfast.

Because it is all far from over yet. David Ervine, the leader of the pro-Yes Progressive Unionist Party, joined one of the few parties in town on Saturday night at the Europa Hotel in Belfast city centre.

As he stood with his wife, drinking Guinness, his smiling face often fell as he briefed supporters and loitering journalists.

In the hours after the confirmation of the massive Yes vote, he said, community workers in Nationalist areas of the city had been warned their personal safety was seriously at risk after threats issued by the Loyalist Volunteer Force - a splinter paramilitary group that has never declared a ceasefire.

Yesterday, slowly standing up in front of the fireplace she had been cleaning, Mrs McMullan slipped her feet into a pair of slippers and padded around her home discussing what the Yes vote might mean to people like her in Northern Ireland.

Had she voted? ''Of course. I never waste a vote. It took long enough for us to get one you know,'' she said. And how had she voted? With a quizzical stare Mrs McMullan simply responded: ''Yes''.

''We are all living in hope now that things will calm down and everything will work out alright for everybody,'' she said.

''Everybody had to give, everybody had to take and everybody had to lose to get this far.

''Nobody is really happy with what we've got, but there are parts in the deal for everybody. There can be no winners and no losers if we are to get peace.''

Mr McMullan said he failed to understand why, after 71% of the voters said Yes, the Democratic Unionist leader Ian Paisley has insisted on claiming victory: ''I do not know what kind of man he is. Does he really want to live the way it was 100 years ago?

''What decent, ordinary people want is an end to the violence and that's not what I hear him saying.''

All the windows at the back of the McMullans' home are protected by homemade chickenwire screens. At the bottom of the garden is a 10ft high wall, beyond that lies Dead Man's Alley.

Neither likes to talk about what has happened there, all Mrs McMullan will allow herself to say is: ''It got its name because that's where people are knee-capped and shot.

''It's been bad here, but what can you do? You have got to get on with living, so you might see something but you have to forget about it right away. It's safest that way.''

The continual presence of the Army and the pressure to join Nationalist paramilitary groups forced young men from nearly every home in Beechmount Crescent to leave Northern Ireland for the mainland, said Mrs McMullan.

''This country has been living in fear for so long we need something better for the future. Let's hope this is it,'' she added.

When the news of the referendum came through on televisions and radios from the King's Hall in Balmoral, south Belfast, it was greeted with near-hysterical screams of delight from Yes campaigners at the count.

On the Falls Road and across the city on the Nationalist Lower Newtownards Road, there was hardly a murmur.

People seemed to know almost immediately, but the jubilant scenes many outsiders expected did not materialise.

Excited little girls ran in and out of their homes dressed like miniature brides before their first communion at St Peter's Cathedral in the Falls, while boys bounced footballs off red, white and blue kerbstones in the streets off the Newtownards Road.

It was a picture of normality - and perhaps that should say it all.