It cannot be hidden

“He will never be forgotten Kate, I promise you that.” Words of comfort offered to the widow of Constable Stephen Carroll, the latest victim of Northern Ireland’s troubled past, present and inevitable future.

With the iconic image of the Chuckle Brothers, Rev. Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness doing the business of government, the island took a collective sigh of relief. Believing the wars were over, we were united, at the very least, as members of one tribe – humanity.

Of course, privately the working relationship of these two blood enemies was tested on a daily basis. It may not have hit the headlines, or have shown from a cursory glance at the TV, but the body language and tension could not be hidden.

Politics in Northern Ireland is a very personal thing. You carry it with you in the church you attend, the pub you frequent, the street you live in, the name you inherit. It cannot be hidden.

There is an assumption of who you are and what you believe in before you engage in any action.

The open wounds of decades of hate in a province where the fault lines of mistrust run deep were never truly healed in the North. The peace and calm of the surface of Northern Irish life obscures the turmoil and ever growing discontent a few have with the Peace Process and what such an iconoclastic message former enemies working together communicates.

No cross-community project, intergovernmental arrangement or the dismantling of fortresses can quell this anger. Constable Carroll, and the two British soldiers - Pat Azimkar and Mark Quinsey - are victims not just of dissident barbarity but of our desperation to believe that the Northern Ireland problem had just disappeared. With the significant threat of additional attacks by these dissidents, any chance of continued normality for the province has all but disappeared.

It took 14 hours for the Sinn Fein leadership to condemn the killing of Constable Carroll - a testament to what this party really believes in.

The peace march organised by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions on 11 March should send a clear message to Sinn Fein and the rest of the political parties in Northern Ireland. Peace is not a commodity that can be bartered with. Peace is a right and something that has been earned by all in Northern Ireland. It took workers, galvinised by the return to street politics, to send a clear message to dissidents that their actions were in no one’s name.
These were acts of terrorism, plain and simple.

Acts of terrorism, not just against a Government whose legitimacy is debatable, but acts of terrorism against a people. Against the most vulnerable.

We broke what seemed an unending cycle of murder and ceasefire. Let us not be ceded to our own “dark and barbarous past”, as the author Sam Harris put it.
No murder, no bomb, no spent casing shall be in our name.