Editorial: Mary Kielty's loss was a reminder of the agony caused by terrorism

​There was a striking coincidence yesterday, when Patrick Kielty’s mother was buried.​

Mary Kielty was laid to rest in Co Down at the age of 84, yet she had been widowed in the 1980s when she had barely lived half of that lifespan. The Ulster Freedom Fighters murdered her husband Jack, father to the comedian and broadcaster Paddy, in 1988. It was a savage sectarian killing.

At almost the same time as the service for Mary Kielty, a gathering at Stormont yesterday heard from the relatives of two other loyalist murder victims.

Caroline D’Eath, whose father Gerald was murdered by a UVF bomb left on a building site he was working on in Glengormley in 1975, spoke of how she has no memory of her dad, having been four at the time of the blast. Gerald was helping to build a Catholic school and the terrorists knew that most of the workmen were Catholic too.

Ms D’Eath told her story to the annual European Victims of Terrorism event at Stormont, as did Colette Murray, whose brother Cyril was murdered by loyalists in an anti Catholic sectarian killing. Shortly after midnight one night in 1982, loyalists wearing balaclavas burst into their Kerrsland Drive home in east Belfast and shot him at the top of the stairs.

Cyril was not the intended target of the killers. They’d gone to the wrong house and murdered the 51-year-old retired teacher and keen artist. Two victims of republican terror also spoke at the Stormont event.

These stories are all reminders of the lifelong devastation caused by terrorist murders. Loyalists killed more than 1,100 people during the Troubles. Far from having good intelligence, as the many reports of collusion would imply, they were typically purely sectarian and evil slayings.

Mourners heard yesterday of Mary Kielty’s resilience. These survivors stand in total moral contrast to the murderers.