Northern Ireland’s flawed peace has still saved countless lives

A fortnight before the signing of the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday 1998, 25 years ago tomorrow, two republican terrorists were waiting at the back of a supermarket in Armagh city, Northern Ireland, for Cyril Stewart. Mr Stewart was a former police reservist, medically retired the previous year after a heart attack. He was well known in the city and in local football circles where he was an official. He was executed in cold blood in front of his wife at the back of a Safeway’s in pursuit of Irish unity.

Barely three weeks earlier, the future inaugural First and Deputy First ministers of the Northern Ireland Executive stood together in a small village, 20 minutes’ drive from where Mr Stewart was murdered. David Trimble and Seamus Mallon, who led the first cross-community government, visibly stunned and distraught, were visiting families of two more Irishmen slain in pursuit of another perverted fantasy. The Loyalist terrorist group the LVF had apparently outsourced the random murder of Catholics in the mixed village.