![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Northern Ireland
Apr. 19th, 2019 02:31 pmI just went to The Guardian. Journalist Lyra McKee (29) was killed last night. There was rioting in Derry. A masked man fired at police, and there were journalists nearby. It's the 21st anniversary of the Good Friday Accords. Twenty-one years ago, a bunch of people who'd been fighting for centuries said, in the words of James Tiberius Kirk, "I will not kill today."
I have been indirectly affected by 3 IRA bombings (Oxford Street, Harrods, and the one on my parents street in the mid-1990s). That doesn't include the rash of bombings in 1981-83 that I just happened to be in town for. A friend of my father's was killed in one of their attacks on the British Army in Germany. And while I blame the IRA and its many off-shoots, I know that the Ulster Brigades committed their own violence.
21 years. And the petrol bombs, masks, and shootings are back. I do blame Brexit -- especially the threat of hard Brexit -- for some of the rekindling of old troubles.
But the fact is, all it needs is for people to again agree: I will not kill today.
I have been indirectly affected by 3 IRA bombings (Oxford Street, Harrods, and the one on my parents street in the mid-1990s). That doesn't include the rash of bombings in 1981-83 that I just happened to be in town for. A friend of my father's was killed in one of their attacks on the British Army in Germany. And while I blame the IRA and its many off-shoots, I know that the Ulster Brigades committed their own violence.
21 years. And the petrol bombs, masks, and shootings are back. I do blame Brexit -- especially the threat of hard Brexit -- for some of the rekindling of old troubles.
But the fact is, all it needs is for people to again agree: I will not kill today.
