Madam, - Seven years after an all-Ireland referendum, North and South, determined that politics on the island should be conducted by exclusively peaceful and democratic means, it appears the IRA is eventually bowing to the will of the Irish people.
At this moment, it is important that Irish democrats and democrats everywhere should reflect on the futility of the violence of the past thirty years.
The facts are that 2,054 people were killed by republican paramilitaries; 1,020 people were killed by loyalist paramilitaries; 368 people were killed by the security forces. Tony Blair should reflect on these figures after his crass comment this week that the IRA would never "have set about trying to kill 3,000 people". We must never forget the victims of the Troubles nor the life sentence being faced by thousands of their family members.
We must also continually challenge those who wish to revise history and sanitise their bloody campaigns. This applies to the recent comments by the senior republican strategist Jim Gibney who said: "The essential and important difference between the IRA's campaign and those who bombed London last week is the IRA did not deliberately set out to kill innocent people."
Tragically, the bloody facts clearly and emphatically challenge such an assertion. The Abercorn bomb in Belfast on March 4th, 1972, which killed two and maimed 70 people, was a deliberate attempt to kill innocent people.
The IRA pub bomb in Birmingham on November 21st, 1974 killed 21 people, was another deliberate attempt to kill innocent people. So was the fire-bomb planted by the IRA at the La Mon House Hotel on February 17th 1978, which killed 12 people.
The 21 bombs planted by the IRA in Belfast, killing nine people, on Bloody Friday - July 21st, 1972 - was a deliberate attempt to kill innocent people. The IRA bomb Remembrance Day bomb in Enniskillen, which claimed 11 lives on November 8th, 1987 was a deliberate attempt to kill innocent people.
The IRA Shankill bombing on October 23rd, 1993, which killed nine people, was a deliberate attempt to kill innocent people.
Tony Blair should also remember that although the IRA did not use suicide bombers, they did create the first human bomb when in 1990 they forced Patsy Gillespie to drive a car loaded with 500kg of explosives to a border checkpoint outside Derry, where the bomb was detonated by remote control. Mr Gillespie and five soldiers were blown to pieces.
It is time that everyone associated with the conflict spoke truthfully and honestly about their past actions. Without truth it is difficult to have reconciliation.
As Bishop Desmond Tutu said, "True reconciliation is never cheap, for it is based on forgiveness, which is costly. Forgiveness in turn depends on repentance, which has to be based on an acknowledgement of what was done wrong. . ." - Yours, etc,
Cllr TIM ATWOOD
(SDLP),
Andersonstown Road,
Belfast 11.