Call for unity as slain teenager laid to rest

ALL political leaders in the North must speak with one "united voice" to defend the right to life, mourners at the funeral of murdered Catholic teenager Gerard Lawlor heard yesterday.

Patrick Walsh, the Bishop of Down and Connor, told a packed St Gerard's Church in Antrim Rd, Belfast, that Mr Lawlor was killed simply because he was a Catholic.

"Sunday night was a night of manifest raw sectarian hatred which could have resulted in multiple murders and which, indeed, did culminate in the murder of Gerard, a totally innocent young man, murdered for one reason and one reason only that he was a Catholic," Bishop Walsh said.

"And for some, being a Catholic is a crime deemed to merit execution," he said.

"Within hours of his death, the all too predictable dance of death over Gerard's grave had begun.

"People, often with sanctimonious faces and voices, were playing the blame game and the point-scoring game."

Bishop Walsh criticised the loyalist paramilitaries who had murdered Mr Lawlor as he walked home from a night out on Sunday, and accused them of terrorising the entire society in the North.

"It was hatred that murdered Gerard and there is a deadly progression in hatred from the first sowing of the seeds of hatred in a young mind to young lips spewing hate-filled words and threatening slogans, to hands painting frightening graffiti and hurling pipe bombs and petrol bombs and being armed as a member of a paramilitary gang," he said.

"Paramilitary gangs operating under a confusion of labels and cover names are terrorising not alone those whom they label as the enemy, but indeed their own communities.

"Across the whole community, people are living in terror, in terror from the enemy without and the enemy within."

Bishop Walsh told mourners he understood police resources were stretched in North Belfast, but all citizens were entitled to protection. He also called for "fearless leadership".