Teenagers have two escape routes out of the drudgery of life in places like Dublin's North Strand. They can risk the wrath of their local communities and become drug dealers amassing wealth in a short time through the city's endemic heroin trade.
Or they can join one of the myriads of paramilitary factions that still exist in this last republican stronghold of the Irish capital.
It was here that Seamus Costello, the founder of the Irish National Liberation Army, the organisation that killed Airey Neave in the House of Commons car park 20 years ago, was shot dead in 1977.
Jim Flynn, the Official IRA assassin who killed Costello, was himself gunned down in the North Strand five years later close to the exact spot where Costello died. IRA and INLA members 'on the run' from the police and army in Northern Ireland have always found sanctuaries in the North Strand.
It demonstrates the tenacity of republican ideology that boys from areas like the North Strand are still hearing the call to arms and choosing the latter option by joining terrorist organisations such as the Real IRA. According to Irish police sources the two boys caught in a Real IRA training camp last week rarely attended school and were regarded as among the 'no hopers' in the area.
In the North Strand, a working class inner-city area of high-rise flats and drab public sector houses, bordering Dublin city centre, joining the 'movement' gives you status, a feeling of importance, a sense of belonging. Young working class Catholics growing up in similar estates in west Belfast in the early Seventies must have shared those same sensations when the Provisional IRA first emerged. An older man already facing terrorist charges in the Irish Republic allegedly recruited the two boys, Stephen Kelly and a juvenile, into the Real IRA, the terror group behind last year's Omagh bomb atrocity.
Irish police sources in Dublin believe 19-year-old Alan Ryan, from the Donaghmede area of the city, inducted them into the anti-peace process paramilitary force earlier this year. Their alleged recruitment was part of a drive by the Real IRA to bring in 'unknowns', young impressionable men, some barely in their teens, with no obvious republican or paramilitary connections.
Recruiting the young into armed struggle is a tradition that dates back to the start of this century. The playwright Brendan Behan joined the republican movement back in the 1940s when he was just 14. He signed up with a boy of the same age, Cathal Goulding, who went on to become IRA chief of staff in the 1960s. Behan and Goulding lied about their age and were accepted into the IRA's junior wing, the Fianna Eireann.
Following the defeat of the IRA's 1956-62 border campaign Behan's brother Dominic even wrote a ballad The Patriot Game as a warning to young idealistic teenagers about the dangers of being seduced by armed struggle. But it was a warning that was never heeded.
At the start of the present Troubles thousands of teenage Catholics in Northern Ireland, some as young as 13, swelled the ranks of the Provisional IRA. Like Behan before him, Anthony McIntyre from Ballymurphy in west Belfast lied about his age to join the IRA. He was 16 years old when he volunteered even though the official age for entering the IRA was then 17.
'There were loads of lads who lied about their age just to get into the movement. There were people who were jailed for IRA offences when they were 15. The Brits used to have a special wing in Crumlin Road jail for them - the Juvenile Remand Unit - which housed all those under 17. There were IRA volunteers killed in the conflict who were only 15 and 16.'
One of the most ruthless and feared terrorists of the Troubles, the INLA's Gerard 'Dr Death' Steenson, was only 16 when he killed his first victim. Steenson made a name for himself in republican circles when he assassinated the Official IRA's leader in Belfast, Billy McMillen, right in front of his young wife on the Falls Road in west Belfast during a republican feud in 1975. Also known as 'the altar boy' for his boyish looks and neat appearance, Steenson killed scores of RUC officers and fellow republicans. His speciality was to shoot his victims, as he did with McMillen, at very close range.
Recruiting teenagers into their ranks is not confined to Irish republican terror groups. The loyalist paramilitaries also seduced hundreds of boys, some as young as 14, into the UVF and UDA at the beginning of the present Troubles.
Former UVF prisoner Robert Niblock was 15 when he joined up.
Two years later Niblock was given a life sentence for a sectarian murder and served a 16-year prison sentence in the Maze. Niblock said his mother only found about his involvement in the UVF when news of his arrest was broadcast on the television.
Does the presence of teenagers inside a Real IRA firing range in Co Meath suggest that a new generation of young republican fighters is emerging? That a third generation is preparing to take up arms for the cause?
Former IRA veterans like Anthony McIntyre do not think so: 'In the early 1970s there were thousands of young nationalists ready to take up arms and fight. There is nothing like that now, the reservoir has dried up.'
He believes the recruitment of Dublin teenagers reflects a weakness rather than a strength of the Real IRA. 'If they were recruiting teenagers by the score in west Belfast then that would be a different matter.
'If you are going to wage armed struggle then you have to take the war to Belfast and Derry and so far the Real IRA have not done that. If they get off the ground after Omagh their campaign will be confined to the border,' he said.
That analysis is shared by older republicans including Sean Cronin, former Washington correspondent of the Irish Times, who was a senior member of the IRA in the 1950s. Cronin was one of those who planned the IRA's ill-fated Operation Harvest, the 1956-62 border campaign against military and police targets in Northern Ireland and Britain.
Cronin said one of the reasons why the IRA refused to wage war in Belfast was because it would provoke a violent backlash by Protestant extremists. Their attacks were confined to the border and hence easily repelled by the heavily armed Northern Ireland police force.
'We had no problems in Belfast, there were plenty of volunteers at our disposal. We left Belfast out of the campaign because we never had the means to defend the city's Catholic population from mass attack by loyalists.
'There will always be people wanting to take up arms to end partition in Ireland, that seems inevitable. But things are changed now and I don't think a new border campaign will achieve anything.'
The impotence of a renewed Real IRA border campaign is compounded by the success of the Irish police against the terror group over the past few weeks. In the past fortnight the gardai have arrested and questioned 26 Real IRA suspects in counties Meath, Dublin, Wexford and Donegal. This number constitutes just over a quarter of the Real IRA's entire membership throughout Ireland, north and south. Most of the success is down to surveillance on Real IRA suspects. As one senior garda officer put it: 'We are literally living in their gardens.'
Thirteen of the 26 Real IRA suspects now face charges in Dublin's Special Criminal Court. They include Alan Ryan who was out on bail on arms charges when he was discovered inside the secret firing range last week. The Republic's opposition leader, Fine Gael's John Bruton, is to raise the issue of bail for Real IRA suspects in the Dail. Bruton said he was 'deeply concerned' that someone facing charges for having a loaded gun could be bailed to continue his terrorist activities.
Meanwhile, the boys whom Ryan allegedly recruited into the Real IRA face an uncertain fate. Stephen Kelly, 17, was remanded into custody at St Patrick's young offender's centre in Dublin. A file related to the younger boy and two other people arrested last week has been forwarded to Ireland's Director of Public Prosecutions.
When the gardai raided the underground firing range last Wednesday night 45-year-old Seamus McGrane - thought to be the second in command of the Real IRA in Ireland - was allegedly giving his young recruits a lecture.
It included a demonstration on firearms in the wine cellar of the derelict country house outside Naul, 25 miles north of Dublin. McGrane was interrupted by smoke grenades and an announcement that there were armed gardai outside.
When the 10 people gave themselves up, officers armed with Uzi sub-machine guns were stunned to discover such a young boy among them. The local garda commander, Chief Superintendent Michael Finnegan said: 'It is absolutely astonishing that a 14-year-old youth should be caught up in circumstances such as this.'