Response will decide who wins - Confronting extremism

It is nearly 17 years since terrorist zealots as evil — and as utterly wrong — as those who brought carnage to the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris on Wednesday inflicted an atrocity of similar scale, impact and immorality on the people of Omagh.

Response will decide who wins - Confronting extremism

Just over three years later al-Qaeda killed 2,996 people in one of the most dramatic terrorist attacks in history, one made all the more spectacular because it was seen almost as it happened on television. The 9/11 attack was as gripping as it was terrifying. A little over a decade later, and after hundreds more lethal terrorist attacks, Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian extremist killed 77 people, some in Oslo, others at a youth summer camp on the island of Utøya.

After the initial horror and anger in Omagh, and right across these islands, after the tears were no longer everyday, the Republican outrage re-energised efforts, through the democratic process, to try to consolidate the new but uncertain peace in the North. A divided society understood in a new, undeniable way that change and concession could not be deferred again if terrorism was to be defeated by being made irrelevant and impossible. The atrocity did not have legitimacy but it had, and thankfully has, a real consequence.

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