Someone has paid for the intimidation.They must be hunted down

END violence or the Americans will pull out. That was the stark headline on the front page of last week’s Irish Mail On Sunday, and it appears to have had a galvanising effect.

In an interview with John Lee, Quinn Industrial Holdings director John McCartin spelled out the potential consequences of the ongoing attacks on QIH personnel and property, and said quite clearly that 850 jobs in the company were on the line. On Tuesday night on the BBC’s

Spotlight programme, we learned first-hand of the effect of those attacks as QIH executive Kevin Lunney told of his horrendous ordeal at the hands of kidnappers, who inflicted barbaric torture upon him.

This week, after years of dragging their heels in the face of rising levels of violence, the PSNI and An Garda Síochána finally took muscular action to root out the perpetrators who have terrorised not just QIH but an entire swathe of the Border, where people live in fear of speaking out lest they too are targeted. In one raid in Buxton, near Manchester, the chief suspect in the Lunney kidnapping, Cyril McGuinness, collapsed and died while police were searching his home. Efforts now must be redoubled because while McGuinness may have been the henchman, someone was paying him to wage a campaign of intimidation, and that person or people must be brought to justice.

We have waited a long time to get to this point, but now that things have stepped up a gear, every resource needed must be supplied to law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Border. Everyone has a right to be protected by the State, and if that protection is not forthcoming, it poses a severe threat to our very democracy itself.