Michael Shilliday: Northern Ireland does not want to go back

Michael Shilliday is an Ulster Unionist Party member, Chairman of the Young Unionists and a blogger at Slugger O'Toole

The last police officers to be murdered in Northern Ireland were killed in 1997 and 1998.  The last soldier to be murdered was also killed in 1997. The O’Reilly, Graham, Johnston and Restorick families must have thought that they would be the last service families to suffer.

Our thoughts and prayers are every bit as much with those families as our thoughts are with the families of those murdered this week. In 1997 I was twelve years old.  I, and thousands like me, thought that we would be amongst the first to not know the horrors of violence to the extent our parents did.