In the autumn of 1993 I was working for a Fleet Street newspaper on assignment in Belfast during one of the most harrowing weeks of the Troubles. Between October 23 and 30, 24 people were murdered. The killings began with the IRA bombing of Frizzell’s fish shop on the Shankill Road in which ten people, including one of the bombers, were killed. Loyalist terror gangs staged a series of revenge attacks, targeting Catholic workmen and families.
The memories of that week have stuck fast: a solitary shoe on the bloody floor of the pub; the piles of rubble on the Shankill; the raw grief and seething anger at funeral after funeral. Serious voices talked of all-out civil war, and optimism about talks between the moderate nationalist leader John Hume and Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Fein, dissolved.
