Eight Protestant men were murdered in an IRA bomb attack on their minibus at a rural junction.

The massacre was marked yesterday by an outdoor service. Activist on behalf of victims of terrorism, Kenny Donaldson, aptly described the massacre as having been motivated by “naked ethnic and sectarian hatred”.

Minority Protestant populations west of the Bann and along the southern sections of the border are familiar with this hatred and the three-decade attempt to drive them out of their communities.

A particular tragedy about Teebane’s death is that it occurred at the end of the long Republican campaign of murder and mayhem, when terrorist leaders were growing desperate.

By the early 1990s, the IRA had been greatly penetrated by the exceptional work of the security forces, and support for the paramilitary group was waning (never having been high).

It was a sign of Republican desperation that they should target civil servants or those, like the Teebane workers, who supplied or worked with the military. Yet the ultimate failure of IRA violence, which led to the first ceasefire in 1994 and another in 1997, was only the start of a long propaganda war, which the Republicans are allowed to win.

In addition to gross distortions about collusion, which was negligible (as evidenced by the manifest lack of good intelligence held by loyalist terrorists, so that they heavily resorted to purely sectarian killings), the deluge of money poured into investigations against the state’s legacy would lead any young man today to think – as the Reverend Clements, son of a murdered RUC man, wrote on these pages on Saturday (see link below) — that the forces of the state were the villains of The Troubles.

In fact, the Republicans murdered 2,100 dead out of 3,600 unrest, but their legal and narrative assault on the British state, backed by Irish authorities, is not even verbally challenged in London, let alone met with a legal volley. back.

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