Ben Lowry: Ken Bloomfield was one of the people who helped keep society running during the Troubles, despite the attempts to murder them

(Click here to read Ben Lowry on the violence and immigration)

​I was representing the newspaper – among the many things that he did in his distinguished career was to write for us occasionally, unpaid, in retirement. I also went on a personal level, because I have memories of Sir Ken back to childhood. In fact I was with one of my parents when we called at his house before it was bombed by the IRA in 1988 – less than a year before, perhaps only weeks before. We were woken up in our house by the noise of the blast at 6am, even though we lived more than a mile away, in Bangor.

The death of Sir Ken reminds me of the death recently of Ronnie Appleton, another man I knew professionally and via family. Ronnie, who was chief prosecutor during the Troubles, had bodyguards at his house in North Down. It was fascinating for a boy to see such armed police at his home and one of his personal detective bodyguards showed us his gun. Now I think what a drag and an invasion of privacy it would be to have bodyguards, and how frightening it would be to have seen legal colleagues murdered. While our report on p13 on Sir Ken focuses on the IRA attack, that was only a small part of the service. Such fine men, who kept society running, didn’t peddle legacy grievance, even though fanatics tried to kill them.

Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor