It's twenty five years since the end of the IRA hunger strike. The lessons learned then aren't being applied now; that if you call something a war, the people you capture are prisoners of war, not criminals; that internment without trial is not something any civilised country should do. These aren't difficult concepts.

My parents were pulled over by the police on the way to a memorial service for one of the hunger strikers, a man my father played football with & maintains to this day did nothing wrong, that a gun was planted on him. If they had admitted where they were going, that would have been it. Go straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect £200. No trial, nothing.

That wasn't the only close call they had, either. I remember being permanently scared when I was small. Scared of the people in this country, the ones who drew a swastika on our shed. As far as I could see, that was all of them. They all would have happily got rid of us. The neighbours were suspicious of us, with our strange accents & sports, when we frequently consorted with others of our sort at the parish centre (oh, & if they could have seen what went on in there! The collection plates going round for 'The Cause').

It saddens me that muslim children are still forced to feel how I felt.