On this day, twenty seven years ago , the PIRA bomb team, which I have publicly named, [ all of whom are still alive, some active in the SF/IRA election campaign in North Belfast] killed my father and so wounded my mother that she died the next day.
Let’s focus on my mother, Ellen Sefton, aged 66, retired. Her only connection to “the conflict ” as SF/IRA now call it, was to be married to my father and to be a Protestant. No words of apology were ever uttered by PIRA about her death. She was the subject of a sectarian assassination involving collusion by the State, no different to those killings suggested by republicans. In all the forty years I knew her she never uttered a word against Roman Catholics. She was ahead of her time. She befriended gays and Jews and loved the heady atmosphere of New York. She loved its words and its freedom. She loved her family. She looked after her mother till she died at 92. She was full of life. She was my biggest fan. Perhaps that’s why it hurts so much.
Twenty seven years on , the State campaign of ‘forgive and forget’ is still being waged. Useful young idiots , solicitors, businessmen etc. are tapped up with promises of places on NGOs, slap up dinners, and photographs with the great and the good; if only they would embrace the “Peace Process”. The hurt and damage that these people cause is beyond measure.
For all of these 27 years the State has lied to me, about the big stuff, its involvement with PIRA, with Libya -and about the little stuff, who knew what about UCBTs. The State knows who killed my parents, why would they not? They had so many informers that by 1990 they had over run PIRA. So why don’t they come clean? What dead hand prevents disclosure? Who protects the like of Sean Maguire? To what end?
Who could believe the British Government about any security issue, old or current? A lesson that many of us have learned and many of the relatives of the dead of Manchester and London will soon learn. Nothing is ever as it seems and the State will always lie to you.
I miss my parents every day.
I’ll continue to fight for them till my dying breath. It has cost me every material thing I owned but that doesn’t matter.
If I don’t do it , who will?
And I still own myself….