The eradication of the victims of Enniskillen

In Northern Ireland, the dead are being eradicated. This week marks the 35^th anniversary of the IRA bombing of a remembrance service in my hometown Enniskillen. In an attack so barbarous it was condemned at the time by the Kremlin, a bomb planted the night before slaughtered 12 of my neighbours standing around the town’s cenotaph. No warning had been given. The chemist, the teacher, the nurses, the retired police officer, the housewives, the house painter, all standing around a war memorial with the names of Catholic and Protestant locals on it who fought and died in the trenches, were cut to pieces. My father, one of the first responders, discovered his colleague and wife dead in the rubble. It was an image that haunted him to his death. 

Thirty five years later Mary Lou McDonald, the leader of Sinn Fein, declared at her party’s annual conference that there was ‘no comparison’ between the IRA, inextricably linked to her party, and the gangland violence currently plaguing the Republic of Ireland. A