Victims of the Troubles remembered

More than 3,500 people who died as a result of the conflict in the North were being honoured today.

For three hours the names of each victim of the Troubles were being read during a Good Friday ceremony in the Dublin Unitarian Church in St Stephen’s Green.

The annual act of commemoration – now in its 12th year – is the only religious service of its kind in Ireland.

Andy Pollak, of the Centre for Cross Border Studies, said the reading of names illustrates powerfully the terrible, random nature of death in war and civil conflict.

“All human life and death is in this mournful list,” he said.

British soldiers, IRA volunteers, loyalist paramilitaries, Ulster policemen and women, gardaí, part-time UDR men, prison officers, civil rights marchers and judges are remembered, alongside the innocent victims of all ages killed in cities, towns and villages across the North, the Republic and Britain.

The list starts alphabetically with Anthony Abbott, a soldier from Manchester shot dead by the IRA in Ardoyne in north Belfast in 1976.

It will finish with William and Letitia Younger, an elderly Protestant man and his daughter, who were beaten, stabbed and shot by intruders in their home in Ligoniel in 1980.

Chronologically, the sad litany begins in 1966 with John Patrick Scullion, a Catholic storeman shot by the UVF in Belfast.

The last victim, Catholic PSNI Constable Ronan Kerr, was murdered in a car bomb attack by dissidents in Omagh, Co Tyrone, last April.