How Sinn Fein got away with murder

The online world should be credited when it gets something right. And on Twitter an account titled ‘On This Day the IRA’ gets something very right. Granted, it’s not your usual internet fare. It includes no videos of cute animals sneezing. It is simply an archive-rich account which records what the IRA did on that day in history.

Naturally, each day brings more than one thing to commemorate. On the day I’m writing, the account records James Keenan and Martin McGuigan, two Catholic 16-year-olds blown up by the IRA in 1979 while they were on their way to a Saturday night dance. There are also anniversaries from 1977 and 1988, and Reginald Williamson, a 46-year-old father of two who was killed in 1993. The girlfriend of the off-duty RUC member was driving behind him in a separate car after a night out together. She described the effects of the under-car bomb going off. A bang, a scream, and then, as she ran over to her boyfriend, the first fruit of the IRA’s labours: ‘I looked down and his legs were gone.’

Aside from families, friends and this sombre account, few people remember these dead. Few joined the ranks of famous victims who emerged from larger, or state-caused, atrocities. The families rarely got any apology out of the IRA greater than ‘Sorry our car bomb went off early, or in the wrong street’.

Have we become so preoccupied with online crimes that actual crimes have begun to take a back seat?

If there was any justification for this, it was that in the North and the South of Ireland things needed to move on. For two decades, such sentiment held because the peace held. This in spite of disturbing corners, such as those secret portions of the Good Friday Agreement that allowed the loved ones of people killed by British soldiers to seek justice, while the families of those killed by the IRA were expected to watch their murderers walk free, and sometimes into government.