Patsy McGurk, who died last week aged 86, was a rare man, a quiet man and a man of great courage and dignity.
In 1971 he suffered the shocking loss of his wife, only daughter, home and business, when loyalists bombed his small Belfast pub on a Saturday night in December, killing 15 and injuring many more.
He was a generous Christian as well as a devout one. A couple of hours before the bombing, he delivered pies to the Morning Star hostel for homeless men. After the bombing, he went on television to call for there to be no retaliation. He said he was praying for the bombers.
"What's done can't be undone," he said. "I've been trying to keep the bitterness out of it."
All he was left with, after the bomb, said Mgr Tom Toner at his funeral, was "his three fine sons and his faith". His three fine sons carried his coffin. All were at home in the rooms above McGurk's Bar on the night of the atrocity, and two were buried under the rubble. Their 13-year-old friend, who was playing table football with them, was killed.
Mgr Toner commented that only people who are over 40 can remember the bomb. There were a lot of grey heads in the church.
The bar was on North Queen Street in north Belfast, one of the hardest hit areas throughout the Troubles. The bomb marked the start of a steep decline into the savagery of 1972, the worst year.
An eight-year-old boy delivering newspapers saw the bombers in a black car with a union jack sticker on its back window. He saw a tall, masked man in a long coat carrying a large box into McGurk's and lighting the fuse. The child ran, and was lifted off his feet by the blast. Inside, customers who survived recalled a sudden smell, a flash of light from the hall, then darkness, dust, pain and screaming.
In the pub, 10 men and two women were killed, all of them regular, local customers. McGurk, who was hurt, thanked God his wife and daughter had been at church. Tragically, Phyllis and 14-year-old Maria, had in fact just entered the building and caught the full force of the blast.
The disinformation began immediately. Even as neighbours, soldiers and ambulance men dug with their hands in the smoking ruins, British military intelligence officers were briefing politicians at Westminster and Stormont as well as journalists, that this was not a massacre of innocent people. This was an "IRA own goal"; McGurk's was a bomb factory.
Junior minister for home affairs John Taylor said forensic evidence supported this theory, and that loyalists were too "mature" to carry out such an attack.
Nationalists were appalled at this deeply wounding and untrue claim about a highly respected family. One local man returned the medals he had been awarded for his service with the British forces during the second World War in protest at army raids on houses in the streets around the bomb in the hours after the explosion.
The claim was not retracted even after the "Empire Loyalists" claimed responsibility. Indeed, several years later, it was repeated in a book by a British army colonel. It appears likely the loyalists intended to bomb a bar frequented by Official IRA supporters up the road from McGurk's, but there were men standing watchfully outside it.
In 1978, a UVF man was arrested and, mistakenly believing he was about to be charged with it, admitted his role in the McGurk's Bar bomb. The circumstances surrounding the bombing raise disquieting questions, and there are sinister intimations of security force collusion.
Of course, loyalists needed no encouragement when it came to killing Catholics. The IRA ignored Patsy McGurk's call to resist retaliation. A week later, the Provisionals detonated a no-warning bomb in a furniture store on the Shankill Road, killing two men and two infants.
The father of one of the children spoke of his great pain, and said politicians were dwelling in the past and playing with people's lives. They should sit down and talk. Other Protestants took a different view and joined loyalist paramilitary organisations. The man who rescued John McGurk was murdered by them.
Many Catholics saw the lies about McGurk's as evidence that there could never be justice for them in the Northern Irish state, a view reinforced the following month by the Bloody Sunday massacre by British paratroopers, which swelled the ranks of the IRA.
Patsy McGurk did not become famous for his brave words, as Gordon Wilson did, when, 16 years later, Wilson spoke with similar grace about the loss of his daughter, Marie, in the IRA's Enniskillen bomb. McGurk raised his boys, and was married for a second time to Ann, who died last year.
Some of the other relatives of those killed in the bomb have campaigned for the full truth to be told about the atrocity. An elderly lady at the funeral last week told me that very recently, someone said, when McGurk's Bar bomb was mentioned: "Oh, but they deserved that. That was an IRA bar."
Patsy McGurk had the rare ability to forgive. That does not mean that his family and the families of the other victims don't deserve, belatedly, a measure of justice.
Garret FitzGerald is on leave