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Ballydugan Four

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. That is partly what this debate is about. It is about seeking justice. It is about justice for those who served in uniform, as he said, and the importance of that.

Colum Marks headed up the gang and carried out the atrocity, lying in wait with his detonator in a forest just across from Ballydugan. When he had pushed the button and killed four brave, courageous young men, he got on his motorbike in his blue boiler suit, went up the railway embankment into Downpatrick, burned the motorbike, disposed of his blue boiler suit and was picked up by another person. There were 16 people involved in this. There was the person out on the road who told the people at Ballydugan that a Land Rover patrol was on its way. There was another person down the road who confirmed that. Another person left a 1,000 lb bomb. The next time hon. Members lift a 2 lb packet of sugar, they should multiply that by 500 to get the magnitude of the bomb left at Ballydugan. How long did it take them to put that bomb in that culvert at Ballydugan? They were seen doing it, by the way. The question I ask—the Minister knows this because I spoke to him beforehand—is why that visual evidence was not acted upon as it should have been to warn that UDR patrol and other patrols in the area.

Another person was picked up at the shopping centre—the hon. Member for South Down (Ms Ritchie) will know the area better than I do—and taken to a safehouse, where he showered and changed his clothes. The clothes were destroyed and he was moved to another house. Sixteen people were involved in the murders of those four UDR men. Colum Marks is the man who pushed the button and blew the four UDR men to smithereens. He was also the IRA commander involved in the murder of John Moreland—the hon. Lady will remember this—who was a coal merchant on the Flying Horse estate in Downpatrick. As he did his last delivery, he was attacked by two men and shot dead.

Colum Marks’s hands are red with blood. Let us be honest. This man was not a freedom fighter. He was a low-life, mentally deficient psychopath, with no human decency whatsoever. He was rotten to the core, contemptible, detestable and loathsome. He was a man with no good in him whatsoever; a man that should never have been born. That was the sort of man he was.