The loyalist gunman turned peacemaker we should never forget

IT’S not often the death of an elderly man, someone you barely knew, pulls you up short.

And especially when the name of the man is synonymous with a way of life that was, to many of us, unforgivable.

But I stopped what I was doing when I heard of the death of Gusty Spence. I was in company at the time, with friends who remembered his image from the 1960s. Oddly enough, we had been discussing the prospects of Martin McGuinness in the Presidential election. My friends were astonished when I said that if you wanted to know someone who was genuinely committed to peace — for its own sake — and someone who was prepared almost to lay down his life for peace, Gusty Spence was the real thing.