An off-duty senior detective in Northern Ireland’s police service was ambushed last night by masked gunmen as he helped at a football coaching event in Omagh, Country Tyrone. Two assailants fired at least four bullets into Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, shooting him on the ground as his terrified son looked on. He remains critically ill in hospital. PSNI detectives investigating his attempted murder are pursuing dissident republican terrorists in the ‘New IRA’ as a strong line of inquiry. Three men have been arrested.
Twenty five years ago, this sort of casual barbarity gained not much more than a sidebar in a local newspaper. The frequency of execution-style attacks by the IRA on defenceless police officers off duty – in shops, restaurants, farms, on the steps of churches – was justified by their political representatives as a ‘war’ and was sadly too commonplace. So the universal condemnation from all political parties in the province to last night’s appalling attack is welcome progress.
Dissident republicans form a rag-bag and perma-splintering coalition of former IRA combatants and new recruits; they are opposed to even the semi-skimmed peace that has endured in Northern Ireland since 1998. The poor town of Omagh, which I visited on many childhood shopping trips, has for too long been the canvas for their nihilistic violence. In 1998, irredentist maniacs slaughtered 29 people in a bomb attack on the town. No warning was given in one of the most savage civilian attacks in post-war Europe.
Thirteen years on, another attack took place in the town. PC Ronan Kerr was killed by dissident republicans who planted a bomb under his car in 2011. He was the last PSNI officer to be murdered. A Roman Catholic recruit, Kerr symbolised the new, inclusive police service in Northern Ireland. His killers have never been brought to justice, but there is little doubt his religion was why he was targeted.
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