A Sickening Feeling in My Stomach

I haven't blogged in some time; I had a small family calamity at the week-end which now seems, thankfully, to have resolved itself.

It's difficult to know what to write, given what has happened in the last few days. I found out about the shooting of two soldiers at Massereene barracks on Sunday morning, it gave me a sickening feeling in my stomach. The attack was ruthless and calculated as you will all know from the news reports.

Over the next day or so I dreaded news reports until, the next grim installment came with the news that a police officer in Craigavon had been murdered. This news was, if anything, more sickening than the first killings as it suggested that the Massereene attack was not an isolated incident, but the beginning of a campaign.

At 25, I am old enough to remember the troubles buried in my older memories, I can't fully explain the feelings I experienced when I heard about these attacks. We hear of attrocities all over the world on an almost daily basis on the news and they wash over us. This one didn't, it hit with a blow like a tidal wave, instinctively it seemed people old and young knew that this was something terrible and there has been a tremendous movement in recent days from people wanting to show their resistence to sliding back. The breadth of the public show of horror and disgust is heartening, no terror organisation can sustain a campaign in a vacuum of public support. Terrorists rely on people pretending not to see what they have seen and not to hear what they have heard. So long as people are prepared to break the silence then this campaign will be short-lived, I pray and hope that this will be the case.