The shooting on Wednesday night of a PSNI man probably sickened more people than it shocked.
Refusal to let the past be past still hits like being hurled backwards, physical shock. Even knowing that the drip of hatred might last forever, it was horrifying that one or more gunmen in the car park of a Tyrone sports centre stood over someone they had already shot and put more bullets into him.
Since the 1998 agreement that aimed for a level playing field in the north, 159 people have died at the hands of paramilitaries, 58 killed by ‘dissident’ republicans.
Revulsion at the August 1998 bombing in Omagh, less than two miles from the Killyclogher Road, helped to splinter what might have become a coherent anti-agreement force.
The list of violent deaths since and those responsible for them is a welter of shambolic groupings. Loyalists have been more caught up in feuds, drugs and extortion than even pretence at their counter-productive ‘defence of the union’. The republicans who have killed, maimed and tried to kill have used many titles. It is impossible to detect a shared strategy with a united Ireland as end-point.
Last March, then Secretary of State Brandon Lewis, on the say-so of MI5, announced that the level of threat from dissident republicans had been lowered from severe to substantial for the first time in 12 years.
Throughout the Troubles paramilitaries and security forces have had a pattern, call and response. IRA boast followed by SAS ambush; arrests, finds, outed informants; bombs in ditches that blew apart police cars, army buses.
The New IRA as umbrella for several factions has apparently been hard hit by infiltration, arrests, jail sentences.
Derry may be too small and inter-connected for conclusive investigation into the wildcat shooting that killed young journalist Lyra McKee in 2019, while she watched a riot faked-up for television cameras in Creggan. A New IRA statement admitted responsibility for her death. Only a group in the last stages of directionless violence could have taken pride in that.
Sure enough, two months later a New IRA statement said they had put a bomb, which failed to explode, under a policeman’s car at a Belfast golf club. You need to show you’re still in business to recruit. Physical agony and awful grief is irrelevant.
Those who believe themselves entitled to deal out violent death and injury grab opportunity as a gift. Guessing what, if anything, singled him out almost certainly flatters the coherence of the New IRA but the first suspicion is that Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell’s volunteering made him an easy mark.
There would be extra kicks, crude political thinking topped with macho showing-off, in targeting an off-duty policeman with community spirit working with young people.
Behaving as though any civic-minded person should consider policing Northern Ireland a worthwhile career offends fanatical minds. This was someone with his son, packing up the kit he used to coach young footballers.
History here both old and recent is a powerful reminder of grievances that will never be satisfied.
In Ukraine, trying to second-guess a possibly irrational Putin stretches nerves and infrastructure, soldiers on both sides destroyed physically, maimed mentally by involvement in dreadful atrocities. In Turkey thousands are trying to recover their dead, while critics of non-existent aid efforts are arrested.
By day on Wednesday at Westminster there was a wash of sentiment on behalf of little Dáithí, the teddy bear from the Speaker, Irish from the SDLP’s Claire Hanna, a characteristic tin-eared, red-faced Sammy Wilson rant.
The DUP and the ERG have never more obviously been Brexiteer leftovers.
A few hours later there was ugly and brutal bravado in Co Tyrone.
