Every girl makes a hero of her father. Our correspondent Alexandra Blair’s father was a hero. Lieutenant-Colonel David Blair, Commanding Officer of the Queen’s Own Highlanders, was murdered by the IRA 25 years ago today with 17 of his comrades at Warrenpoint, on the Irish border.
It was the culmination of one of the bleakest days in the history of Anglo-Irish relations. Hours earlier, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, naval officer, statesman and cousin to the Queen, had been assassinated with three (later four) of his party in an explosion in Donegal Bay. Then, on the other side of Ireland, a double ambush followed. First a bomb killing six members of the Second Battalion The Parachute Regiment. Then an attack on the men who came to their aid, claiming another 12, among them David Blair. The Army had suffered no greater single peacetime loss since the Second World War. And, in the person of David Blair, they murdered their most senior officer.
In today’s news pages, Alex Blair describes her visit to the site of her father’s death. She went unsure of her motivation and discovered a need to lay ghosts to rest; a daughter’s desire “somehow to reassure myself that our father was not waiting for us to take him home”. As we follow the adult journalist, we are never far from the ten-year-old child: her father’s final words to her; a pair of epaulettes being the only trace left of him; money sent by the British legion for Christmas presents. We hear a good deal about “the story behind the headlines”. Ms Blair has lived it. In her quiet dignity she proves herself her father’s daughter.
The enormity of the massacre that took place at Warrenpoint has tended to be overlooked in the wretchedness and outrage generated by the death of Lord Mountbatten. Grief on the nation’s part, together with sympathy for the Queen and the young Prince Charles, served to overshadow in the public mind the two subsequent atrocities. The twisted tacticians of the IRA could consider it a triumph. But what many throughout Ireland acknowledge today is the firm, steady and calm recovery of Northern Ireland’s streets and villages by that same British military.
The hard lessons learnt in Northern Ireland have been translated into peacekeeping skills admired across the world and in demand from Sierra Leone to Afghanistan. The hard lessons of the courage it takes to be a soldier are learnt every day by families who lose loved ones. Alex Blair learnt to bury her hurt as she buried her father’s picture deep among her jumpers. While the people of Warrenpoint mourned and “picked up every bloodied stone and piece of flesh they could find” .