The Telegraph, February 18, Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP
It seems like a lifetime ago when as an officer in the Scots Guards I served in Londonderry in 1976/77, in the Bogside as part of Operation Banner. I remember only too well the hatred and killing and how daunting it was to police the huge angry crowds on the first anniversary of Bloody Sunday to fall on a Sunday. That Christmas, whilst on patrol I could see, emblazoned across huge posters, the statement, “Seven years is too long.” I wondered at the length of the troubles that Christmas, but little did I think that the anger and the killing would go on for 20 more years, until ended by the 1998 Belfast or Good Friday Agreement (GFA).
The GFA was a difficult pill to swallow, particularly when those who had maimed and killed so many were let out of prison and continue to cause grief. The body of my friend Captain Robert Nairac, a brave man taken by the IRA, has never been discovered and his parents went to their graves not knowing.
It was devastating too for Norman Tebbit, my constituency predecessor, to have to watch as the man who bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton, leaving his wonderful wife, Margaret, paralysed and in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, walked free.
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