Portadown victim of pipe-bomb is buried

Protestants and Catholics gathered at a church in Portadown, Co Armagh, yesterday to mourn Ms Elizabeth O'Neill (59), a woman who, by practice and example, bridged sectarian division in a town which is often portrayed as a cauldron of sectarianism.

The victim of a loyalist pipe-bomb in the loyalist Corcrain estate died, her family believe, because of Drumcree. Now was the time to have that burden lifted from the town of Portadown, mourners were told at the funeral.

A Protestant woman married to a Catholic, whose children were reared as Catholics, Ms O'Neill's funeral service was held at St Gobhan's Church of Ireland church at Seagoe, Portadown.

More than a thousand people attended the funeral ceremony conducted by the local minister, the Rev David Chillingworth, Dean of Dromore. He was joined at the service by local Catholic priest Father Sean Dooley. Among the large attendance were the Ulster Unionist Party leader Mr David Trimble, SDLP Assembly member Ms Brid Rodgers and the DUP mayor of Craigavon, Mr Mervyn Carrick.

There was great sympathy for her husband Joe and sons Martin and Justin who, according to Mr Chillingworth, had lost a happy woman of "love, humour and generosity". She was of a mixed marriage where neither partner had to "blur or dilute" his or her religious identity, the minister said.

There was a "precious intermingling of Protestant and Catholic, Catholic and Protestant running right through Elizabeth's family," he added. He looked forward to a time when such religious harmony could prevail in the town.

Even amid the sorrow and the tributes of the funeral service, however, there was no escaping Drumcree. One of Ms O'Neill's sons, Martin, had told the press his mother was murdered because of "a seven-minute walk down a road, they do that to my mother. Is it worth that?"

Mr Chillingworth made an impassioned plea yesterday for a resolution of the Drumcree impasse. "I say with all the moral and spiritual and pastoral strength that I can command that I believe that the time for honourable agreement is now," he said.

"Our community here in Portadown needs to have the burden of this dispute lifted from it, and I hope that the people of this community will recognise an honourable agreement when it comes and accept it." Some people might describe her killers as mindless, he said, "but I do not, for to say mindless is to take away responsibility. They are responsible for what they did. They will answer before God for it. A whole community is moved to the depths of its soul by the cruelty of what they have done." The Church of Ireland Bishop of Down and Dromore, the Right Rev Harold Miller, said the "utter hatred of sectarianism and the tragedy of division which is Northern Ireland invaded a happy and peaceful home".

Ms O'Neill, he added, her family and the people of Portadown "were bombed by the kind of peo ple who are capable of destroying the lives of anyone who doesn't fit into their narrow, Godless shell of religion and politics".

Four men and a woman arrested on Saturday in connection with the murder and three other people were still being questioned by police last night.