There is nothing quite like it in the history of human civilisation. Eras and aeons come and go. Blood and brains spatter the ground and are absorbed by the unfeeling earth. Bones are bleached in the sun or drowned in the mud and eventually crumble to dust. The tears dry up and the sobs are silenced and the survivors who wrapped themselves in hard oblivion die out in time. Fintan O'Toole writes
People carry on and try to forget, and humanity arms itself in the brutal resilience it has learned over the millennia. Some parts of what happened are mythologised and remembered, usually different parts for different sides, usually with a selective, tendentious kind of memory that involves a wider act of forgetfulness.
There is, so far as I know, in all of this bloody history and pre-history, just one example of an inclusive remembrance in which every victim and every death is recorded with stark and scrupulous sympathy. Most conflicts, of course, are too large, too chaotic, too devastating to allow such an act to be performed. There are too many missing people, too many mysteries, just plain too many.
The Northern Ireland conflict of 1966 to 2004 is unusual in that its obscenities unfolded at a relatively steady pace over time and on a small, intimate canvas. It is possible to see its victims as individuals, to see each murder for what it is: a vast and vicious rent in the fabric of life. This is what David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea did in 1999 when they published the devastating book, Lost Lives.
The appearance, five years on, of a "newly revised and updated" edition of Lost Lives is itself a terrible reminder of the book's importance. When the book came out first it seemed to mark the end of an awful story. Now there are the codas to carnage, added atrocities, new, improved butchery. David McIlwaine, an 18 year-old student stabbed four times in the heart and then mutilated "for fun". Andrew Cairns, 22, beaten, kicked and then shot in the head in front of a large crowd at a bonfire, some of them children.
Trevor Kell, a taxi-driver with two kids and no political connections, shot in the head while answering a bogus call. Gary Moore, a builder, also with two kids and no political connections, shot in the head while he worked, by people who claimed to be avenging Trevor Kell. Ciaran Cummings, 19, waiting for a lift to work, found dead on the roadside by his mother after the sound of the shotgun woke the neighbourhood.
Gavin Brett, 18, murdered because he was standing near the entrance to a GAA club and was thus assumed to be a Catholic. Martin O'Hagan, journalist, whose daughter was passing by in a car when she saw him lying on the ground and thought he had tripped and fallen. Hugh Cameron, beaten, stabbed and his throat cut because, even though he'd run 30 marathons, he wasn't fast or fit enough to escape the gang that had gone out looking for a Catholic to kill.
James McMahon, beaten to death with baseball bats. David Caldwell, a builder, who picked up a booby-trapped lunchbox at a Territorial Army base in Derry. And on, and on.
These killings brought the running total at the end of 2003 to 3,703. They also showed the crying need for acts of memory and the fatal cost of the failure of Irish society, north and south, to absorb the reality of violence into its bloodstream. A decade of the peace process, with its necessary evasions and strategic elisions, has given us a generation for whom the business of murder is vaguely glamorous, linked, not to stupidity and cowardice, but to some twisted notion of idealism and commitment.
It's not just the names of the dead that are now forgotten, but the broad shape of the violence. The little movie that runs in so many people's heads now is that of IRA men shooting at loyalists or the British army. The reality is that just over a thousand of the 3,703 victims were either paramilitaries or members of the British army, while more than twice as many were civilians.
In the case of each of the major players in the conflict - republican and loyalist paramilitaries, the British army, the RUC - the biggest category of its victims was civilians. Of the 1,781 deaths caused by the IRA, all but about 460 were Irish people, yet how many people still believe that the IRA fought "The Brits"?
It is of extraordinary importance that the people of this island should know these things, that the stories we tell ourselves about what happened over the last four decades should bear the closest possible relationship to the sordid reality. There is, quite simply, nothing the Government could more usefully spend some money on than in sending a copy of Lost Lives to every household on the island. With the economies of scale, it should be possible to do this for less than €20 million - or about a tenth of the money wasted on the abortive Abbotstown stadium project.
As a mark of respect to the dead, as a way of informing present debates and as a signpost for the future, the cost would be as nothing compared to the disgusting price already paid for ignorance, prejudice and inhumanity.