Ben Lowry: The lop-sided Troubles death toll in Fermanagh caused by IRA killings is a key reason for Pat Cullen to give her view on such violence

I use the word ‘refusal’ consciously. When the News Letter (perhaps alone?) asked the former head of the Royal College of Nursing her view on the matter last month, we tried to contact her personally, and via her party, Sinn Fein.

We wrote up the story (click here to read it) saying that she had “declined” to answer it, in case for some reason she had not yet replied but would soon do so.

But now she has had so many chances to explain things, including on BBC Radio the other morning, it is fair to describe it as a refusal. Incidentally, Ms Cullen has not so much as acknowledged our queries, let alone answered them.

On the Nolan Show I gave five reasons (see the relevant clip from the show in the embedded tweet on this web page) why I thought this was a particular question that she, of all the major NI election candidates, should be asked her view on this. Earlier that morning the Ulster Unionist candidate in Fermanagh and South Tyrone Diana Armstrong had been on Radio Ulster with Ms Cullen and had asked about the 1987 IRA Enniskillen Poppy Day bomb and the murder of three nurses in that atrocity. Ms Cullen just replied generically about not wanting to return to the dark days of the past.

The five key reasons:

1. That Sinn Fein is unlike any of the other main parties here in having been inextricably linked to a paramilitary organisation.
2. The IRA’s record in Fermanagh, the area she wants to represent, in which 90% of Troubles deaths were IRA killings (more on that below)
3. Three nurses were killed in the Enniskillen bomb, which happened in the constituency she hopes to represent
4. There is no party that has raked over the past like Sinn Fein – not loyalists, not ex security forces, not IRA victims, not the UK state, not unionist politicians. The republican movement has been allowed, at great UK taxpayer expense, to chase the security forces through the courts
5. Ms Cullen has been a robust defender of nursing excellence, indeed implying their goodness too, and scathing about the views of others such as Tory politicians, so should make her own position clear on paramilitary violence

It is the death toll in Fermanagh about which I want to focus here.

For years I have been challenging the increasingly dominant view of the Troubles, of the IRA as resistance to a brutal British state, which was in hock with loyalist terrorists. It is disproved by a glance at statistics: around 2,100 people killed by republicans; around 1,100 killed by loyalists; around 360 by state forces. Most loyalist victims were the targets of sectarian attacks, and only a small fraction, by some accounts less than 2%, were republican terrorists. Loyalists had poor, even useless, intelligence.

But even though I have had an interest in such statistics going back decades, I did not know the Fermanagh figures until less than 10 years ago. They tell an extraordinary tale of a one-sided sectarian onslaught against the Protestant minority in the county, with barely any retaliation, let alone ‘collusion’.

Of 116 people killed in the county, 100 were killed by republicans (99 of those the IRA). Five were killed by loyalists, five by the army, one by the UDR, one by the RUC, one a terrorist by their own device, and three died of other causes such as drowning.

The isolated unionists of other locations such as Castlederg faced a similarly one-sided onslaught.

Who ever talks about this? Where are the documentaries? The films? The articles? When do unionist commentators ever raise it? What attention has been given to historians such as Henry Patterson who have documented such border murders?

How admirable were unionists in such locations. They patiently just took on the chin decades of targeted murders, often by terrorists who based themselves in the safe zone of the Republic, to which they would flee after attacks and from where they would plot their next murder of an easy target farmer, comforted by the knowledge that the Irish would not extradite them (a refusal that unionist supporters of the Stormont House legacy agreement failed to get scrutinised in that 2014 deal).​

Ms Cullen is confident of becoming the MP for these one-time killing fields, hence why she is being questioned about the IRA.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor