Lethal violence - Time to reconsider our response

THERE was a time not so very long ago when a few steadfast voices were derided for suggesting that terrorism posed a real threat to the stability of this country.

Though that nightmare never came to pass because it was not allowed to, there was a decade — between the burning of the British Embassy in Dublin in 1972 and the hunger strikes in 1981 — that that prospect had an alarming ring of possibility about it.

Though we are not anywhere near the same degree of jeopardy we are on the same journey, but now criminals represent the threat rather than the “politicals”.