A genuine hero died at the weekend, but he will soon be forgotten. John Fee, the SDLP assembly member from Newry, had the guts to condemn the IRA, for which, in March 1994, he was badly beaten by the Provos.
Even his tragically early death, however, took place offstage, while the organisations that he stood against were hogging the limelight. It is the killers who control public memory. On the day of his death, Sinn Féin was staging a weird pageant on the Louth border, with fake guns and fake uniforms, to commemorate five IRA men who blew themselves up 50 years ago. And the UDA, even while announcing that its "war" was over, was engaging in its own parody of history, inviting the rest of us to express our gratitude that it intends to stop killing people.
The official loyalist version of the past was articulated on RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland yesterday by Pastor Kenny McClinton, a former UDA killer. He said: "People in loyalist circles are driven by ideals and the defence of their country. The only reason for them to exist is to defend the loyalist community. It is cause and effect. The IRA rebellion was the cause. The effect is armed loyalism."
Kenny McClinton is a reformed character, who has done a lot of good work. But his version of loyalist paramilitarism is a very big lie.
After its establishment in 1971 up to 2003, the UDA/UFF killed 430 people - most of them innocent Catholics. There is no doubt that many of the 40,000 men who were members of the UDA at its height in the early 1970s were, like many members of the IRA at the time, misguided idealists, who believed themselves to be defending communities that were under threat from IRA bombs. But loyalists started killing innocent Catholics at a time when the IRA was moribund. The UVF was re-established by Gusty Spence and others in 1965, and started killing Catholics the following year.
It's worth remembering, though, that thousands of people in those communities chose not to get involved. Sammy Duddy, who became a prominent UDA figure, described to Peter Taylor in his BBC television history of loyalism how a UDA recruiter turned up at his local community centre with a Union Jack, a Bible and machine gun and announced, "right, we're all here to join".
Duddy recalled: "I was nearly killed in the queue to get out. There was a mad rush for the door." And whatever about the original impulse of defence or anger that led many into loyalist paramilitaries, the buzz they got was the thrill of power. In an organisation that has more brigadiers than the combined forces of Nato, swagger quickly replaced idealism.
Dave Fogel, who was a senior member of the early UDA, told Taylor: "I was walking around the streets with the power of life and death over people. I must at times have been drunk with it. It wasn't the power that people have given you by votes, but the power given you by violence."
That violence was, from the very beginning, directed at innocent Catholics. All the rhetoric about "defending our communities" was never more than a thin cover for cold-blooded sectarian murder.
Who were the UDA defending when they killed Patrick McCrory, aged 19, as he stood at his front door in Ravenhill, or his 17-year-old brother Cornelius four years later? Whose freedom were the UFF fighting for when they blew up three-year-old Michelle O'Connor with a booby-trap bomb in south Belfast? How did it protect the Shankill Road when the UDA went out and kidnapped youngsters like James Hardy in the city centre, brought them back to the Shankill Road and murdered them? Was the postal worker Danny McColgan murdered, and his grave desecrated, because the post office was a republican conspiracy, or because he happened to be a Catholic?
Time and again, the UDA's claims to have assassinated IRA members were excuses that would have been laughable had they not been so obscene. When they walked into a pharmacy on the Springfield Road and emptied a revolver into the head and body of Philomena Hanna as she lay on the ground, they claimed that "high-grade intelligence" had identified her as a member of the IRA. As an RUC detective remarked at the inquest: "if that was high-grade intelligence, I would not like to see their low-grade intelligence."
When they broke into Cyril Murray's house and killed him with a sawn-off shotgun, they claimed that he had murdered a Protestant businessman, but later had to admit that this was a complete lie. When they murdered schoolboy Gerard O'Hara in front of his mother, as she pleaded with them to kill her instead, they claimed he was in the IRA - a lie so gross that the then Northern Ireland secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, pleaded with the public never to forget the "scarlet wickedness" of his murder.
But did we forget Gerard O'Hara? Of course, just as we'll forget John Fee. The self-regard and self-pity of those who pulled the triggers still trumps the pain and courage of those who suffered.