Fifty years since Bloody Friday, one of so many IRA atrocities

The multiple IRA bombings, in which nine people were murdered and many more injured, happened in the summer of 1972, the most violent months of the most violent year of the Troubles.

It was a grievous crime, at a time when the Irish republican terrorist group was trying to inflict maximum damage on Northern Ireland’s capital city.

It came only weeks after the IRA bomb at the then News Letter offices in Donegall Street, in which seven people were murdered. It was weeks after the IRA attack on a crowded restaurant, the Abercorn, in which two people were killed and many others maimed, losing eyes or limbs. It came weeks before the IRA massacre at Claudy in the northwest.

And it was one of a large number of IRA crimes against humanity in which civilians were slaughtered, such as at Kingsmill or La Mon or Harrods or Enniskillen or Shankill.

It is particularly important to remember anniversaries such as today because the massacres get so little scrutiny now, in contrast to killings by state forces.

Bloody Sunday had a vast inquiry lasting years and costing hundreds of millions of pounds. Ballymurphy had a vast inquest involving multiple QCs and costing millions more, and yet failed to shed proper light on the IRA context of mayhem in which those army killings took place.

Bloody Sunday then led to a major criminal investigation.

Various soldiers in recent years have been charged with historic killings almost all of which lacked pre-meditation. No IRA leaders ever faced criminal charges appropriately severe to their decades of calculated murder and mayhem.

It is a scandal beyond words.

And meanwhile, officials and politicians in Ireland, a state which has granted IRA a de facto amnesty and which refused to extradite IRA murderers, the sort of people behind Bloody Friday, have the nerve to lecture the UK on legacy.