All attempts to destroy democracy by terrorism will fail

In 1969, the present round of what became known as "The Troubles" began in Northern Ireland. I say present because, despite the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, there are still dissidents within the Republican movement who wish to carry on this fight, and who continue to kill and maim both service personnel and civilians for their cause.

I remember the start of The Troubles well, because despite the fact that I was only two at the time, my family moved from Düsseldorf, in what was then West Germany, to Lisburn in Northern Ireland, because my father was a British Soldier serving in the Royal Military Police.

In the twenty-nine years that elapsed between 1969 and 1998, approximately 3483 people were killed, of whom the vast majority were civilians or security forces, killed either by bullet or bomb. And the attacks were not just restricted to Northern Ireland, with several bombing campaigns being carried out in mainland Britain as well as attacks on British bases and service personnel on continental Europe.

Unfortunately, due to the indiscriminate nature of these types of attack, many innocent civilians were killed. One of the most high profile of these cases was Nick Spanos and Stephen Melrose, two Australian lawyers working in London who were on a walking holiday in Europe with their partners in 1990. Having been out for a meal, they were returning to their car, which had British number plates, and were shot dead by two masked gunmen.

The Irish Republican Army (IRA) claimed responsibility, claiming that they had mistaken the two Australians for off-duty British service men and that their murders had been "a tragedy and a mistake".

And this is the major problem with indiscriminate terrorist attacks; innocent people get killed, be they Australian lawyers on holiday or eight year old boys watching their dad competing in a marathon.

But none of this could happen without funding, monies that will enable these terrorists to purchase the weapons that they use and the explosives for the bombs that they detonate. But where does this funding come from?

This is the irony in the tragic events that occurred in Boston yesterday, because yesterday, the citizens of that city became the victims of a terrorist attack, of the type that Londoners and Brummies experienced in the 1970's, of the identical type, two bombs in litter bins, that killed two children aged three and twelve in Warrington in 1993.

So why is this ironic? It is ironic because, much of the funding for the bullets and bombs used by the IRA was raised by the large Irish-American community in Boston, Massachusetts, through a front organisation called NORAID. And here, the techniques that they helped to fund, to kill innocent civilians, have been used against them.

Whilst I do not think that anyone deserves to be the victim of a terrorist attack, I think that America needs to realise that not only did terrorism exist prior to 11th September 2001, but that it is not always perpetrated by those from the middle-east. The funds that their citizens raised provided not just the raw materials for terrorists, but also funded the training and helped to develop new techniques of murder, some of which have now, forty years on, come back to haunt them.

And the quote that is the title of this entry? It was taken from a speech by Margaret Thatcher that she delivered as Prime Minister to the Conservative Party Conference in October 1984, the morning after a bomb that had been planted by the IRA in the Grand Hotel in Brighton in September 1984 had detonated, killing five people. It had been their intention to kill the Prime Minister and her Cabinet, an aim that failed.