The Good Friday Agreement and the amnesia over the Troubles

It was an overcast Sunday morning in January 1983 and two IRA gunmen were waiting outside Belfast’s St Brigid’s church. After attending mass, judge William Doyle was settling into the driver’s seat of his green Mercedes. He was hoping to escape the congregation throng when two Provisional IRA killers, wearing duffel coats with their hoods up, fired at point blank range through the side driver’s window. As the gunmen fled, they passed Doyle’s daughter, Liz, who saw them hand their weapons to a girl walking a dog. In the chaos, the gunmen and the girl disappeared. The judge’s brother Dennis, a doctor who was also at mass, immediately started CPR in a vain attempt to save William before Canon Paul McAlister, who had just celebrated mass, administered the last rites on the street outside his church. 

I arrived about an hour after the judge’s murder; his car was still parked on the kerb surrounded by a thin strand of police tape.