"I'M a thief and a burglar" said the placard hung round the neck of a teenager in Ireland's tough Shankhill Road.

As you've probably guessed, this justice wasn't meted out by any court - unless you count the kangaroo variety, as run by the ex-paramilitaries.

But let's not go into that. If the bloke was innocent, what happened to him was a crying shame.

HOWEVER, let's assume for a moment he did do what's alleged. I bet he won't be doing it again in a hurry. And neither will his mates. Or anyone else living near the Shankhill Road.

And I bet, on reflection, that Helen Newlove and her family would have been happy to see this kind of robust justice meted out to the three thugs convicted of killing her husband Garry, rather than the flabby sentence they will undoubtedly be slapped with.

Garry stood up to the usual suspects, who were drunk on cheap booze, and paid for it with his life. One of them had been bailed for another attack just 10 hours before.

In a moving and devastating address after the trial, Helen Newlove described what she thought had gone wrong with the society that allowed her husband to be kicked to death by boys.

"Society accepting this type of attitude gives out the wrong signals," she said. "Youths should not be allowed to congregate on street corners and under bridges, putting fear into people who only want to pass them by without facing foul-mouthed back-chat."

I could - and did - contemplate just reprinting her address as my main piece in the column this week. It was better than anything I could have written.

But there is something else here. And that is that at the centre of all the vile, abusive, drunken, toe-rag, "whatevvver" malaise affecting Britain is a bunch of people who are more affronted by the rough justice of the Shankhill Road than by what happened to Garry Newlove.

On the face of it, the Shankhill Sheriffs are wrong. But if someone had handed out the kind of swift and fitting retribution to the yobs who killed Garry Newlove before they stepped up to murder, maybe he'd still be alive now.

The correct people to do this are parents, teachers, judges and the police.

But too many parents don't care, too many teachers are stymied by yob kids' rights and too many police are spending their days refereeing petty squabbles among the underclass, and rubber stamping administrative detections.

If our coppers were freed from the paperwork and put back on the beat, if we regarded all crimes of violence as the hate-filled acts they are, maybe Garry would be alive now. If prison was a hellhole of boredom, discomfort and the type of physical regime that would break a Royal Marine, fewer people would want to go there. And those that did would quickly spread the word.

As it is we're living in a country were Helen Newlove's speech could be made, to some degree, most weeks. And it's a country where Shankhill justice is beginning to look like our only hope. And that is wrong.