Letters: IRA is still murdering people, 25 years on

It may be almost 25 years since the Belfast/Good Friday agreement and the peace process, but the IRA is still murdering people every year.

When terrorists were decimating our villages, towns and cities by thousands of indiscriminate bombs, they were not just murdering and maiming people on the day of the blasts, but by their actions and deeds of many years ago, people are now becoming ill and dying from conditions directly attributable to the actions of those criminals.

When a bomb was detonated, apart from the blast damage, the explosion spread a toxic cocktail of harmful chemicals that was contained within the bombs over a wide area.

Atomised into the air that those perhaps as far away as several miles from the blast would breathe in and cause serious damage to their lungs, leading to lung diseases and cancer.

Even some of the terrorists themselves that made the bombs in the first place have become sick and died from exposure to the lethal toxic brew of chemicals that they mixed to make the weapons of death and economic destruction.

Many of the buildings at the time contained materials such as asbestos, normally not harmful if undisturbed, but by the action of the violent explosive blast, the deadly material was spread over a wide area by the blast wave in a cloud falling as a dangerous white fibre dust that the security forces, rescue workers and those caught up in such attacks ended up inhaling.

It has now been proven that the cancer mesothelioma with a strong link to asbestos exposure has no safe level of exposure, even a one-time exposure of being caught up in an explosion, or working to clear the debris afterwards can lead to mesothelioma or lung cancer, with symptoms only now starting to develop after many years and sadly resulting in more suffering and death in a campaign that always had an alternative and was never justified.

Stevan Patterson, Castlederg