Peace comes dropping slow, wrote the poet William Butler Yeats. And even when peace does come, it must be nurtured and vigilantly protected like a vulnerable sapling.
Yesterday’s violence in the Creggan area of Londonderry, in which dissident republicans pelted police officers with missiles including petrol bombs, was a graphic illustration of the continued fragility of the peace settlement in Northern Ireland — even as the province prepared for this week’s commemorative events to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement signed in Belfast on April 10, 1998.
