The shocking admission by the PSNI

that they didn’t supply the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland with crucial information about the massacre by the so-called Ulster Freedom Fighters of five Catholics in February 1992 on Belfast’s Ormeau Road, reminds us of what an awful time we lived through during the Troubles.

Among the five innocent people killed in broad daylight when two gunmen ‘sprayed’ a bookmaker’s shop was 15-year-old James Kennedy. Newspaper reports at the time recorded that his last words were ‘tell my mummy that I love her’. Within two years Kathleen Kennedy had died. Her husband James, grieving the tragic and premature deaths of his son and wife lamented ‘the bullets that killed James didn’t just travel in distance, they travelled in time. Some of those bullets never stop travelling.’

What a powerful and poignant reminder of the horror and futility of violence.