“somehow it still fails to address or secure the foundations of a quite different future…”

Despite the statements by the ‘great and the good’, as the BBC reports

Police officers have come under petrol bomb attack during disturbances in Lurgan, County Armagh.

The police said there were also reports of a firearm being seen during trouble in the Bell’s Row area of the town.

Several attempts were made to hijack cars and one hijacked vehicle was later recovered.

The officers were attacked while carrying out searches in relation to a hoax object in Victoria Street.

The UTV report adds

…police say calm has now been restored.

Officers had been examining waste ground at the old Glendinning factory, amid claims that a bomb had been abandoned in the area. The alert was later found to be a hoax.

In a separate security alert in north Belfast, army bomb experts were called to deal with a suspicious package below a car close to Tennent Street police station.

In Craigavon, a suspect device was also found on the Tullygally Road.

Both those alerts were later found to be hoaxes.

As Peter Preston argued earlier

One dead policeman, blown up by a car bomb outside his Omagh home; so many voices from north, south, east and west condemning any hint of a return to random killing.

You can choose to be reassured if you wish. Northern Ireland’s grand coalition still functions (with Robinson, not Paisley). In the 13 years since the last, traumatic Omagh bomb signalled a formal end for even the Real IRA, peace has survived, flourished, become normality.

Why, isn’t the Queen off to Dublin soon? Didn’t Chancellor Osborne dip his hand in our pockets to bail out Ireland’s tottering banks? Who on earth wants to see a few demented deniers, with leftover lives to kill, reignite the carnage because they are bored, mad or terminally stupid? There is surely no “continuity” for this soiled brand of republicanism, only oblivion? Globalisation, take it away.

Yet this commonsensical chorus only takes you so far. It clears the bloody detritus of the past; it provides a suitably united response to the murderers who remain; but somehow it still fails to address or secure the foundations of a quite different future.

Update  And the BBC reports two new security alerts are underway

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