The Real IRA or Continuity IRA seem to have claimed responsibility for the landmine which injured two police officers near Rosslea on Saturday.
A local UUP councillor Harold Andrews has denounced the attack and said
?.this is extremely regrettable as no one wants to go back to the way things were 15 to 20 years ago. I thought these types of actions were a thing of the past and I’m sure a vast majority of people on both sides of the community will be disgusted and upset at this type of behaviour.”
As I have suggested before, however, I suspect those who feel that violence has been banished for ever from politics here have failed to learn the lessons of our history.
That these rumblings carry on should be of no surprise and indeed I still maintain that the campaign by the assorted dissident terrorist groups can be politically likened in some ways to the IRA Border campaign in that it had little public support but presaged the horrors to come. That campaign also largely centered on what Churchill famously, if unfairly, called the “Dreary Steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone” and I honestly suspect there are people who think that “The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered” and still merits violence. I keep hoping to be proven wrong but I note that this latest campaign is, rather depressingly, becoming more dangerous and sophisticated with shootings, car bombs and now landmines.
This author has not written a biography and will not be writing one.
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