Bombing in Down - Democracy treated with contempt

DESPITE the brain-numbing and never-ending avalanche of bad news around our economic suicide yesterday morning’s news from Holywood, Co Down, will register on a different scale all together.

Having to contemplate bankruptcy is bad enough but even remembering what it was like to be a country almost at war with itself is something else altogether. It is something none of us want to experience, or much more importantly, are prepared to tolerate ever again.

It may be hard to convince anyone under, say 40, of the depth of despair and hopelessness that the last round of the North’s Troubles spread right across this island. For almost 30 years it created a negative and aggressive atmosphere, an atmosphere that poisoned too many relationships and some governments. It convinced too many idealists, many of whom just left the North, to live elsewhere and deny their talents to their communities. It was a bitter, hateful time and no one, least of the anti-democratic criminals who detonated yesterday’s bomb close to the British Army base at Holywood, has any mandate to foist that kind of violence on this country — or our neighbours — ever again.