It was a privilege to be at the launch of this research in the House of Lords last night. It centered around the almost forgotten, unique character of killings during the Troubles in Fermanagh where I'm from: The cruel intimacy of neighbourly, townland assassination by PIRA. 1/ 
Cillian McGrattan and Ken Funston have assembled a detailed & sorrowful description of how IRA terrorists tried to devastate a minority protestant unionist population on the fringe of the UK with targeted murder of civilians and local security force personnel largely off duty. 2/
The tactics used were a form of brutal ethnic cleansing which in character, if not scale would not be unfamiliar in Bucha or Srebrenica. The extraordinary thing about this campaign is that it did not ignite reprisal killings by Loyalist terrorists raging in other parts of NI. 3/
The research is meticulously framed in academic terms but it is the personal testimony that lingers. Three brothers mercilessly hunted down. The attacks on school busses. Soft targets executed at work. The fear and dread of a population that felt abandoned by their Government. 4/
Sinn Fein must never be allowed to repurpose the utterly foul character of the hundred murders committed in that locality in the name of 'Irish freedom' as anything more than a sectarian pogrom to destroy the confidence of the unionists on the border. 5/
Indeed these tactics were taken up elsewhere with murderous glee by Loyalist terrorists who later visited the same horror on catholic communities elsewhere in NI. Fear works. 6/
You will hear very little about the 'dogged people' who lived through hell in south and west Fermanagh but are still there, years later. Last night Peers and MPs had at least a glimpse of those lost and shattered lives.
'Bear in mind these dead.' 7/7
'Bear in mind these dead.' 7/7
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