I have met Lord Butler more than once, actually only twice. When I sat beside him after dinner on High Table at University College, Oxford, where at the time he was Master, he told me the apogee of his career was the Good Friday Agreement. He was Cabinet Secretary then.
I was dismayed but as a guest kept my opinion under my hat so to speak, as I wasn’t wearing one. In the last century the British government developed expertise in turning terrorists into democratic rulers in continents far from home. Presidential remuneration and a government Mercedes usually did the trick. The democratic rulers mostly morphed into dictators. However, when it happens on our doorstep it is a different matter. This is my doorstep.
Stephen Tibble was killed in Barons Court aged just 21. He had only served in the police force for six months and left a widow. The man who murdered him was released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, having served only eleven years of his life sentence.
He was questioned by police in Fairholme Road, where it transpired there was an IRA bomb factory at No 39. He fled and when Stephen Tibble attempted to stop him shot Tibble at point-blank range with a .38 Long Colt revolver. He escaped to Dublin where he was arrested for being a member of the Provisional IRA, at which point he was identified as Tibble’s murderer. There was no extradition treaty, so by 1981 he was living in San Francisco from where he was eventually extradited to the UK and given a life sentence in 1988. Eleven years later he was free to return to the United States.
20th January 2000, the Real IRA announce an end to its ceasefire and continue in various guises to murder innocent people. 18th April 2019, a journalist is shot dead in Derry by the RIRA. In the first two decades of the 21st century there has been so much killing. The Good Friday Agreement was not that good, Lord Butler.