Forgive the IRA and we must forgive the Bloody Sunday soldiers too

In my 2010 short story ‘Prepositions’, a woman has lost her husband not in 9/11 but on 9/11 — when coming to the aid of a family whose distress had nothing to do with the World Trade Center. Composed as a letter to a friend whose husband did indeed perish in the Twin Towers, the narrator expresses her dismay at being left to a lonely, private grief, while her friend’s loss is heralded in grand ceremonies in lower Manhattan every year. The point: some deaths count more than others. While all bereavements haunt on an individual level, publicly only a small, elite subsection of fatalities is exalted as especially terrible, unbearable and unjust.

Memorialised by U2, dramatised on-screen by Paul Greengrass, parsed in detail by countless full-length documentaries, including a Radio 4 broadcast only last year, enjoying the premier pride of place in the litany of outrages against Northern Irish nationalists, dissected by no fewer than 30 books, and emblazoned on thousands of T-shirts still available online, the Parachute Regiment’s killings of 14 protesters on Bloody Sunday may still stir the grief of loved ones 47 years on, but you couldn’t say these losses have been ignored.