Editorial: Kingsmill was the IRA slaughter of Protestants

​On and on goes the legacy farce, yesterday including into the Kingsmill IRA atrocity.

The main elements of the story are very simple.

IRA sectarian murderers carried out one of the most brutally sectarian of their many sectarian massacres of the Troubles.

It was not merely a slaughter of Protestant workmen, they specifically asked the Catholic man in the van to identify himself so that he could be spared.

The other obvious aspect of this case is that the RUC were under tremendous pressure at the time. Why? Because they were run ragged by an IRA campaign that escalated in the early 1970s as the brutal provisionals took over the murdering when their Official IRA counterparts/predecessors came to see the futility of bloodshed. This was when any fair minded person in the civil rights organisations realised that their demands had been largely met by the end of the 1960s and certainly by 1972.

But sectarian hate does not respond to such decency and logic.

Are we meant to be relieved that the police ombudsman has generously stated the obvious, that the report into Kingsmill yesterday recognised the “intense pressure and strain” facing RUC officers in 1976? Are we meant to welcome the fact that it is found that the security forces were not in the habit of helping the IRA, merely because there are so many false claims that they helped loyalists?

This legacy process is one rolling scandal. The Irish did not help in Kingsmill because they are allowed to scold the UK, indeed sue it, then stonewall. A weak Labour government betrays its heroic security forces by merely gushing with the Irish in response to that.

Let us thank the RUC for their role in preventing civil war and doing their best to stop murder and mayhem even when it made their job almost impossible.