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The terrible tragedy of Thomas Niedermayer and his family is a reminder that there are still two distinct groups of people living on this island – those involved in such barbarity and the vast majority who had nothing to do with it.
Mr Niedermayer, as an RTE documentary revealed at the weekend, was kidnapped, pistol-whipped, murdered and his body buried in a shallow grave.
He was chief executive of the Grundig factory in west Belfast, which employed 1,300 workers in the 1970s. He fell victim to one of his employees, Brian Keenan, then a trade union official, who also happened to be one of the most ruthless leaders of the IRA.
Mr Niedermayer's body was not discovered until eight years after his death. The full extent of his family's suffering is now revealed.
His widow committed suicide, walking into the sea at Greystone in County Wicklow, and his two daughters also took their own lives, in South Africa and Australia.
Keenan went to his grave as a revered republican, mourned and saluted as one of the architects of the peace process. Only now do we learn of the gruesome role he played in Thomas Niedermayer's murder.
It is hard to believe that almost 15 years have elapsed since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and still such brutal reminders of the past are haunting Northern Ireland.
Hardly a week passes without another revelation about people involved in the dirtiest of dirty wars. Northern Ireland must have more rehabilitated, reformed, even born-again ex-terrorists per head of population than anywhere else in Europe.
Ordinary, decent people, who never fired a shot, or planted a bomb, have swallowed hard and agreed, in the interests of peace, to forgive – if not forget.
The penalties for the most heinous crimes were lifted. Those responsible have walked free from prison, hugged and welcomed back into their family and community folds as if they had done nothing untoward in the first place.
For some at least, their notoriety has not been the undoing of them. Far from it. It has proved a passport to political success, particularly in the case of republicans, if much less so with former loyalist paramilitaries. Unlike the Niedermayer family, life after violence has been much better.
Those who were involved in these terrible events now strut the corridors of power in Ireland, north and south, with a swagger of importance, but still a total reluctance to come clean with the people of this island.
- See more at: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/op....9oqPjrQi.dpuf
