LAST week, masked men forced their way into a Strabane pensioner's home and beat and shot a teenager who was staying there. They also put a gun to his 11-year-old younger brother's face.
The incident happened just after tea time in the Springhill area of the town. The masked men burst into the boy's grandmother's house and beat the 19-year-old teenager with a baseball bat before shooting him in the leg.
The grandmother says that they also threatened her younger grandson with a gun and stole his phone. She says that the family have been left traumatised by the incident and are going to "live in fear every night". She told BBC News NI the family are now living in fear of them coming back.
"How dare they come – I am an old age pensioner – to my home and do that? They have no respect. We are going to live in fear now every night.
"If you are going to target an 11-year-old child, put a gun to an 11-year-old's face and steal his phone, what kind of people are they?"
She said her older grandson was "still very bad in hospital".
In what world exactly is this normal? I'll answer that for you – none. This is another reflection of our sick society.
People will have read the story on the news and, this being Northern Ireland, thought one of two things – that this was an awful attack, or "I wonder what this family did to deserve this?".
If your mind wandered to the second question, the answer is they did nothing to deserve this, it's just your mind has allowed this type of barbaric behaviour to be normalised.
We will think what we think and we will move on, and forget, until the next paramilitary-style attack takes our brief attention, then the next, then the next.
When I was a reporter I would often go to the scenes of paramilitary-style attacks. They tended to always happen in working class nationalist areas – the likes of Creggan and the Bogside – and I would have sought out eyewitnesses to help tell my story.
A lot of the time people didn't want to talk about the incidents for fear of the paramilitaries. Other times, people would tell me the young person who had been shot in the street "deserved it" because of alleged "crimes". They would ream off rumours and things they had heard the victim was accused of.
I remember one incident on a Derry housing estate. I knocked on a door following the shooting of a 17-year-old boy. A woman said she would speak to me if I didn't use her name.
She told me she heard the gunshots and a young man crying out. She said it hadn't been the first time there was a young person shot in the alleyway behind her house. She said she could hear through her open kitchen window the young man crying for his mother.
She ran to her bathroom, got her bath towels and went to him, phoning an ambulance as she went. She wrapped his wound, kept him warm and told him that he would be OK and help was coming soon. Other neighbours joined her, keeping the young man conscious and comforted until paramedics could help him.
Her story made me emotional because this is not usually what happens. Human nature means we are hardwired to help rather than hinder, and paramilitaries have these communities terrified to even offer comfort and assistance to children – because that is what they are, mostly – bleeding in the street. This is not normal.
We find ourselves in another vicious circle. We love those here. The PSNI have their part to play also. People tend to turn to paramilitaries for some manner of 'justice' in the absence of police action – for often complex reasons.
A lot of the time people within these communities don't turn to the police at all, so crimes cannot be investigated. Other times, police find it difficult to secure convictions for various reasons – hostility towards them, a reluctance to engage with them, the 'tout' mindset – and the crime is left unsolved.
The reasons are complex, and things have got slightly better in recent years. But here we are in 2022 with masked and armed gunmen bursting into houses and shooting teenagers, coming out of the shadows in alleyways and blasting young people in the knees. We have paramilitaries organising shootings 'by appointment' and tightening their grips on communities who are living in fear of speaking out against them. We have people clearly still turning to paramilitaries and not the police for 'justice'.
It's not right and it's not normal. And it's time we changed things.
