Dangerous criminals - Prison officer’s funeral

AS world attention focused on the terrorist atrocities in Brussels, the funeral of the latest victim of Irish terrorism was held in Belfast.

Prison officer Adrian Ismay, who died 11 days after he was targeted in a New IRA bomb attack, was cremated after a funeral service in Woodvale Methodist Church, just off the Shankill Road.

About 800 people attended the funeral and the Irish Government was quite properly represented. Mr Ismay was murdered by a group of anti-democratic terrorists — fascists would not be too strong a term — styling themselves as the New IRA. The PSNI, the Garda, and British and Irish intelligence services have warned that this organisation will try to kill police officers, British soldiers and/or prison wardens in the coming weeks to coincide with events marking the 1916 centenary.

Difficult as it is to try to understand why someone might join IS, it is all but impossible to fathom the mind of someone who might join the New IRA and imagine that they have any kind of legitimacy, that they are involved in anything other than thinly disguised criminality. They, after all, enjoy the security and advantages this society offers all its citizens but yet they would try to destroy it.

The New IRA is a combination of the Real IRA, Republican Action Against Drugs, and dissident republicans. It is also a dangerous collection of unhinged fantasists we should do all we can to expose and make irrelevant.