Should Crumlin Road jail be a tourist site?

Visiting time ... some of Crumlin Road jail's first tourists take the tour. Photograph: Paul McErlane

Until it became a tourist magnet, the Rex Bar on Belfast's Shankill Road used to be famous for an armed assault outside its doors. In August 2000, the two-storey red and black coloured pub in the middle of the road that has been Ulster's loyalist heartland for several centuries became the focal point of an international news story.

In front of television cameras, paramilitary fighters loyal to the ex-Ulster Defence Association terrorist Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair launched a murderous attack on the bar. Their "targets" were men drinking both inside and outside the Rex whom the attackers claimed were loyal to the rival loyalist terror group, the Ulster Volunteer Force. Following a UDA band parade and a subsequent brawl between Adair's supporters and UVF members, the Rex came under fire. Adair dispatched gunmen to besiege the pub, firing wildly into a crowd of early Saturday evening revellers.

Since that fateful day, which miraculously saw no one lose their lives outside the shot-up pub, the largest crowds to gather outside the Rex have been tourists rather than terrorists. The Rex has become a must-see stop on Belfast's terror-tourist trail.

Visitors from all over the world take snaps of the portraits dedicated to the original 1912 UVF, to unionism's founding father Lord Edward Carson (the Dublin-born barrister who prosecuted Oscar Wilde), and of those monochrome drawings of the slaughter of the 36th Ulster Division at the Somme four years later - all of which adorn a small courtyard to the left of the Rex pub.

Any "terror tour" however - whether by tour bus, black taxi or private cab - does not discriminate. On the same trip to the Rex tourists will be ferried down to the lower end of the Shankill Road to the lair of Johnny Adair, to the murals and the narrow, grim streets where Mad Dog and his notorious terrorist group "C Company" once reigned.

All the tours are also "ecumenical" - they cross Belfast's so-called "peace lines" from the loyalist Shankill into the republican Falls. Visitors are taken to the grave of Bobby Sands and the other IRA hunger strikers. They are shown Sinn Fein's old frugal headquarters in the Lower Falls and the once nondescript side street that was the centre for decades of insurrection against Britain in Ireland.

Yet, ironically, the magnets that still pull foreign tourists to Belfast, and to a lesser extent Derry with its Free corners and its memorial sites to massacres such as Bloody Sunday, are under threat ... from the peace process. In republican areas, the men in the masks with the IRA legends above them are being replaced by celebrations of Irish traditional culture and sports. Even in loyalist east Belfast the boys in the balaclavas clutching AK47s are being displaced by homages to the city's famous sons, such as George Best and Chronicles of Narnia author CS Lewis.