Ben Lowry Editor

There was some fine weather in Belfast this week with all our visitors in town for the Belfast Agreement anniversary, particularly Thursday - I hope they were still around to enjoy it.

We continued our essays on 1998 and its aftermath, from this posthumous one by David Trimble, to essays by our columnist Ruth Dudley Edwards, the economist Dr Esmond Birnie, the former Taoiseach John Bruton, and the ex Ulster Unionist leader Reg Empey

Another contributor was the academic John Wilson Foster, whom I always read with interest given his experience of living on both sides of the Atlantic

Here are some sceptical observations on this week's events from the academic Dr Cillian McGrattan and from me in my own column

I always remember the BBC's John Ware confronting Colm Murphy over the Omagh bomb and a startled Mr Murphy saying that the atrocity was "a terrible happenin' ". Yet he was found by a civil court to have been a culprit in that appalling massacre, and he was suspected of being behind others too. Most people will have thought of his victims on learning of his well attended funeral

Very sad news the death of the Northern Irish mountaineer Noel Hanna. I have interviewed or talked to several of the NI folk who have reached the highest point on earth but never Noel. I would love to have asked about his scaling of the more deadly K2, a stunning achievement

--

--