++ Police officer murdered in shooting in Craigavon, Northern Ireland ++

After the Massareene atrocity, further disturbing news reaches us that a police officer has been shot dead in Craigavon, near Belfast. Tuesday evening update: Two men, aged 17 and 37, have been arrested in conncection with the murder – much quicker than it used to take to make an arrest …

So far the Real IRA and now, it appears, the Continuity IRA, have attacked the security forces (and tried to kill pizza delivery men), and the worrying aspect for people in Northern Ireland is what are the dissident paramilitaries planning next?

In the last few days, fear has suddenly returned to the streets of Northern Ireland for the first time in over a decade. Tonight’s and Saturday’s murders suggest a return to terrorist violence here. However, although these terrorists  have broken the peace, they will not bring down the Insitutions.

Update: The Continuity IRA has claimed responsibility for this murder of Constable Stephen Paul Carroll, 48, from Banbridge, Co Down. Banbridge, where I used to live, was the scene of a bomb by the Real IRA  on 15 August 1998 which wrecked the town centre but claimed no lives (a trial perhaps for their vicious Omagh bomb later that month) – and, in 1982, when an IRA bomb in the town killed 11-year-old Alan McCrum. Or as has been documented in Lost Lives:

A nine-year-old Derry boy, playing cowboys with his brother in the garden, stumbled over a tripwire and set off a bomb which killed him. 

Do the terrorists wish to return to these dark days when young kids, whether Protestant or Catholic, were “collateral damage” (as the paramilitaries consider them) of such atrocities?

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