A memorial for child victims would be apt

If anyone needed a harrowing reminder of the senseless slaughter of the innocents, it is set out in a new book titled Children of the Troubles — The Untold Story of the Children Killed in the Northern Ireland Conf lict.

The authors Joe Duffy and Freya McClements relate in stark terms the poignant details of children who died during those dreadful years of conflict — 186 under the age of 16.

This statistic is bad enough but the stories in the book underline the human dimension of death, suffering and loss to entire families.

The victims included baby Colin Nicholl, 17 months old, who died in an IRA bomb on the Shankill Road; Rory Gormley, aged 14, who was shot dead by UVF gunmen in the Shankill area and Alan McCrum, aged 11, who was killed by a no-warning IRA bomb in Banbridge.

These were young people who unfortunately happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that is what makes such stories so haunting. It could have happened to any of us.

Those in their 40s and 50s cannot help but measure these deaths against the length and trajectory of their own lives. Their own lifespan is a witness to what was lost by others born in the same decades.

We think of what their lives might have been like — going to school and university, finding jobs, falling in love and getting married, having children and in due course producing grandchildren. Yet all of this was not to be. The natural order of things across generations is not for parents to bury their children but in the cauldron of violence during the Troubles the roles were reversed here for far too many.

The stories also underline the unending grief of these children’s parents, who are frozen in time. Some people claim that ‘time heals’, but the victims know that this is untrue. Time can only help them to cope as best they can.

This book, like the equally harrowing Lost Lives which is in the news on its 20th anniversary, is a monument to grief. While a monument to the thousands of people killed on all sides during the Troubles remains contentious, there might yet be a way to erect a permanent memorial to all the children killed so cruelly in the conflict.

This would bring some comfort to the bereaved families and also remind us individually and collectively of those young lives which were cut short so brutally and tragically. The premature death of children is particularly poignant, and the provision of such a permanent memorial could be relatively straightforward, and not tainted by the painful arguments that have so sadly halted other proposals for monuments.