The chilling attack on a Northern Ireland police officer

An off-duty senior detective in Northern Ireland’s police service was ambushed last night by masked gunmen as he helped at a football coaching event in Omagh, Country Tyrone. Two assailants fired at least four bullets into Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell, shooting him on the ground as his terrified son looked on. He remains critically ill in hospital. PSNI detectives investigating his attempted murder are pursuing dissident republican terrorists in the ‘New IRA’ as a strong line of inquiry. Three men have been arrested.

Twenty five years ago, this sort of casual barbarity gained not much more than a sidebar in a local newspaper. The frequency of execution-style attacks by the IRA on defenceless police officers off duty – in shops, restaurants, farms, on the steps of churches – was justified by their political representatives as a ‘war’ and was sadly too commonplace. So the universal condemnation from all political parties in the province to last night’s appalling attack is welcome progress.