Do more to protect our way of life - Manchester bombings

ANYONE on this island who reacted with outrage, frustration, incomprehension, or something pretty close to a numbing sadness to the murder of 22 young people at a concert in Manchester must temper that reaction.

It is not yet 21 years since IRA terrorists, as deluded as Monday’s suicide bomber but in the name of this country, set off the biggest bomb seen in Britain since World War II. That outrage was used to achieve maximum publicity for the IRA’s anti-democratic cause as Germany was to play Russia in the Euro ’96 football championship in the city the following day.

In the interim, the people of these islands, irrespective of political heritage or ambition, embraced convenient fictions to build and to try to sustain a peace process that, hopefully, will consign outrages like the detonation of a 3,300lb truck bomb on Manchester’s Corporation Street to history. Though that process is on ice, today’s relative stability underlines the most chilling aspect, more chilling than Monday’s 22 deaths if that is possible, of the Ariana Grande concert outrage.