We always carry on as normal
IT WAS strange that the death of Martin McGuinness happened the day before the attack on Westminster, combining two eras of terror in your mind. The BBC led with the news of McGuinness’s death on the Today programme and accorded him the same sort of folk hero treatment it gave Fidel Castro when he died last November.
For instance, we heard that the IRA commander followed English cricket. Oh well that’s alright then… it certainly puts the Birmingham pub bombing (1974) into perspective along with the Guildford bombing (also 1974), the Hyde Park nail bomb (1982) the Harrods bombing (1983), the Brighton bombing (1984), the Enniskillen bombing (1987), the Baltic Exchange bombing (1992), the Warrington bombing (1993) and so many others. As long as he was interested in the fortunes of the English cricket team that sea of blood can’t have been all bad can it? This seemed to be the infuriating subtext anyway.
Lord Tebbit, who was injured in the Brighton bombing which left his wife paralysed, claims McGuinness turned peacemaker to save his own skin because the IRA had been so comprehensively infiltrated by British intelligence that he knew the jig was up and he would be standing trial for murder if he didn’t change his tune. “He was a coward who never atoned for his crimes,” said Lord Tebbit. “There can be no forgiveness without a confession of sins.” McGuinness struck me as someone who deliberately smashes all the china in your house and then, without a word of contrition, glues it back together again and gets the credit for it. A simplistic view maybe but there we are.
In the end he was crucial to the peace process but the carnage he caused in the decades before can’t be forgiven. Though it seems to have been forgotten by many.
And of course a lot of people are simply too young to remember. On one July day in 1972 for instance, 19 bombs exploded across Belfast in the space of an hour. I can’t recall if there were candlelit vigils in those days? We’d have had an awful lot of them if there were. It was the IRA which got us used to the notion that unattended bags were objects of suspicion, of bins and left luggage lockers being removed from public places because bombs could be put in them, of coded warnings phoned in by “a man with an Irish accent”. Which is why the idea of Britain’s towns and big cities being targeted by terrorists is hardly new to anyone who lived through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Then as now we all carried on as normal.
In the meantime what can we do? Perhaps donate to the Air Ambulance charity which performed a vital role on Wednesday (http://londonsairambulance. co.uk/donate) or do a first-aid course to save a life as MP Tobias Ellwood valiantly attempted when he treated the fallen police officer Keith Palmer. More use than a candlelit vigil.
Three new coffee shops opened every day in Britain in the past year. How many branches of Costa, Starbucks or Caffè Nero do our high streets need? Meanwhile 1,782 public lavatories have closed in the past decade. Gallons of coffee but no loos. A definition of hell.