Outside his tight circle of family and friends, probably no-one will remember Fred Anthony. It’s a certainty that no-one will ever make a film of his life and violent death – just one of the numberless cruelties inflicted by terrorists on innocent people during Northern Ireland’s Troubles.

Mr Anthony was a civilian who happened to be a cleaner in a police station in County Armagh. For that crime, midway through 1994, he was sentenced to death by the IRA who planted a boobytrap under his car. The invention of the under car IED is one Northern Ireland’s most enduring exports. Killers the world over have our very own hoods to thank for their tireless work in perfecting this way of dispatching their neighbours or at the very least taking the legs off them.

The bomb detonated as he drove past a church. I haven’t mentioned that Mr Anthony was accompanied by his wife and two children. Building a new Ireland was busy work back then and no doubt his murderers were probably too pressed for time to factor in that possibility. Either that or they just didn’t give a shit.

The bomb did its work and rubbed out another Irishman whose cleaning activities evidently threatened the creation of a republican socialist utopia. It also grievously wounded his three year old daughter who spent a week in a coma with two broken legs and shrapnel lodged near her brain.

What has any of this to do with the crime of Loughinisland which happened barely one month later and is the subject of a newly released docudrama? Nothing much, beyond the gruesome economy of scale. The people mown down in the pub in Loughinisland were killed by disgusting cowards who, without asking me, were effectively acting in my name. Six innocent men sent to their maker in a fusillade of bullets for the crime of being born Catholic, separated from their murderers by a line or two of liturgy and a gaping chasm of humanity. Marry that random slaughter with an inept police response, the whiff of collusion and you’ve certainly got drama out of a scalding personal crisis.

Contrast this with the precision – the awful intimacy of carefully making a booby trap, trying your best to get as much kinetic energy as possible into the device before it’s secured to the underside of a family car outside a family home in the middle of the night. The hatred which transforms someone you might even know into a dehumanised agent of the state you can snuff out and laugh about later. A legitimate target, armed with a mop. Just another little, local travesty to boast about over a pint in the Felons before the dirt has even rattled on your victims coffin. The gigantic, invisible agony of one small act of cruel spite in a town few people outside the North could locate on a map. It probably didn’t even make the headlines on the day it happened. In the awful calculus of televisual grief, bulk matters.

‘Whataboutery’ is a grim Northern Irish parlour game played in high places and low. A way of countering your own crowd’s historic moral insanity with atrocities of equal value from the other side. The board is packed with pieces heavy with symbolism, the pawns, people like Mr Anthony, all too often discarded. But they matter. They add up to a vast weight of sorrow and unspoken grief that anchors our present and future to an inconvenient past.

It isn’t the job of art to help the state but it’s a curious thing that very few, if any, acts of republican extremism are dramatised in the service of justice. Is it, bluntly, because those stories have somehow less human interest? Or that there is a sort of default artistic reluctance to understand the humanity of people preceived to be merely agents or supporters of the state? Or maybe these ‘quiet people’ simply want to remain private in their grief? It’s worth a debate, surely.

The story of our squalid past has two sides. I don’t begrudge the community of Loughinisland any opportunity to show their pain or pursue justice for the dead of The Heights Bar. ‘No Stone Unturned’ is a great name for the piece. There are plenty more still in the ground, though.


Also published on Medium.