Memorial to Armagh dead is reminder of unresolved terror legacy

A small number of the dead were murdered by loyalists, but the great bulk by republican terrorists. Among the dead were 16 Catholic members of the security forces.

The ceremony at St Mark’s Church of Ireland was attended by many relatives of the dead. The Anglican primate in Ireland, the most Reverend Dr Richard Clarke, led the service.

Stanley Burrows, one of the people who helped to organise the event, has cited a dramatic statistic: that Armagh is the smallest of the six counties yet is the place where one third of police officers who died in the Troubles were killed, and one quarter of the soldiers.

This illustrates the vulnerability of communities the closer they got to the Irish border. It is similar to the disproportionate suffering in Fermanagh, which has by far the smallest population in the Province, but which nonetheless saw around 100 people murdered by the IRA (republican terrorists were behind 90% of the deaths in that county, where there was barely any loyalist retaliation).

It is horrifying that so much suffering was inflicted on Northern Ireland by republicans, who murdered 2,100 people, most of which is unresolved in terms of truth or justice, yet republicans demand accountability of everyone else.

Armagh suffered badly because republicans fled across the border, safe in the knowledge that it was unlikely they would be detained by the Irish authorities and extradited.

The government might feel it can push through the legacy structures, with elections out of the way. It would be foolish to do so without addressing criticisms, articulated in our Stop The Legacy Scandal series of essays by victims, ex security forces, academics and others, that the structures will perpetuate an imbalance against the state, particularly the RUC, and that they place no spotlight on Ireland’s role in the violence.