The year 1988 brought no statistical rise in violence, but it included some terrible incidents which have remained in the memory of many who lived through them. One sequence in particular, in March of that year, will always be associated with one of the darkest and most traumatic periods of the troubles, when for a time violence seemed to be spiralling completely out of control. The sequence began not in Northern Ireland but in the British possession of Gibraltar. In the first week of March three IRA members, one of them a woman, were shot dead in disputed circumstances by the SAS in what came
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