Though it is peacetime, the people of Northern Ireland had another sectarian death to mourn recently: that of a 25-year-old PSNI constable named Ronan Kerr, murdered in early April in Omagh by a bomb attached to his car by the Real IRA.
The Real IRA are a band of dissident republican paramilitaries who feel the peace process was a sellout—that a "real" republican would never have accepted peace except as part of a reunited Ireland.
They believe that the new Police Service of Northern Ireland, established in 2001 with a 50/50 Catholic/non-Catholic recruitment policy, is a fraudulent organization, a cover for the old Royal Ulster Constabulary, which was nearly completely Protestant and anti-Catholic for many decades before the new PSNI was created in 2001.
For many decades, there were indeed RUC officers who added exponentially to the misery of the Troubles. For some republicans, that is all they can remember.
But Ronan Kerr wasn’t a Protestant police officer, abusive and anti-Catholic. He was a young Catholic man who wanted to do something positive with his life. So three months ago he qualified as a PSNI police officer.
Described as hardworking and sociable, his mother's "rock" since the death of his father in 2008, Ronan was the sort of "new Catholic" that a tiny minority of dissidents despise. Perhaps the dissidents think Catholics don’t deserve a place in policing or government, unless the state they serve is a united Ireland.
Or perhaps they have an image of Catholics in their minds as people unlikely to ever be taken seriously within a state authority structure?
Amazingly, Ronan’s brave mother Nuala Kerr has asked Catholics not to be intimidated by her son's murder. She has asked that his death not be in vain.
“We all need to stand up and be counted and to strive for equality. We don’t want to go back into the dark days again of fear and terror. We were so proud of Ronan and all that he stood for. Don’t let his death be in vain.” *
Nor will it be. A crowd of 6,000 gathered in Belfast city centre at lunchtime on a work day several days after the murder, holding copies of the Belfast Telegraph with Ronan's handsome face on the front page, silent as they observed his passing—and with it, the solid resolve of (nearly) every Northerner that the past will not be repeated.
“Nuala Kerr: 'Do not let the death be in vain'.”
Caroline Ryan, author of AN OLD CASTLE STANDING ON A FORD: One Yank’s Life in an Almost Peaceful Belfast (Eloquent Books, 2010), is the Northern Ireland Editor for Wandering Educators