Sir, - I am concerned by an aspect of the media reporting of the heinous atrocity in Omagh.
There appears to be a retrospective legitimacy being bestowed on the Provisional IRA campaign. For example, in Nuala O'Faolain's column of August 17th, she states: "This mass murder is a step too far. Even a lunatic can see that the only justification there ever was for an armed struggle, which was the structural entrenchment of anti-Catholic sectarianism in Northern Ireland, effectively ended this very year."
State-sponsored sectarianism in Northern Ireland was being successfully tackled before any armed campaign. The IRA campaign served only to deepen sectarianism and to further divide people and can never be seen as justifiable in any circumstances.
The people who carried out this bombing are now rightly being called fascists, but these are the same people who have been responsible for other atrocities and who are personally known to, and former comrades of, leading members of Sinn Fein. The campaign of the past 20-odd years has always been fascist and the people who died at Omagh no more deserved to die than those at Enniskillen or elsewhere. - Yours, etc.,
Mick Brennan,
Killarney Road,
Bray,
Co Wicklow.