I don`t get angry very often.  I might get a bit grumpy;  I might even be annoyed but it takes something really distasteful for me to get angry.  And in recent days I have been following the circumstances surrounding the untimely death of Dennis Hutchings.   Like me, he was the wrong side of 80;  like me he was an army veteran but, unlike me, he was heavily involved the the Northern Ireland troubles way back in the 1970s, whereas I was fortunate to miss all that but instead spending my national service in the relative calm of BFPO 16 in what was then West Germany.   So I have a lot of admiration for what Dennis, from Cawsand in Cornwall and a member of the Life Guards, went through and I mourn his passing.

But it`s the circumstances of his death that are profoundly depressing, leading to my genuine anger.   I suppose because it has been so widely reported elsewhere that it is unnecessary for me to go into too much detail here;   suffice to say that for an 80-year old with serious health problems to have been hauled into court to account for an incident for which he was alleged to have been responsible over 50 years ago is of itself questionable, especially when those on `the other side` were given immunity from prosecution under the Belfast Agreement.

But it is worth reminding oneself that Dennis Hutchings` trial had been adjourned for three weeks due to his illnesses which included heart failure and kidney disease requiring dialysis.  As a result, the non-jury trial had been sitting at Belfast Crown Court for three days a week to allow him to receive the dialysis treatment he required.  He had previously survived Covid  but also suffered from fluid on the lung.   He was admitted to Belfast`s Mater Hospital where he contracted Covid again and died on Monday.   A real and genuinely tragic end to a life lived for half a century under the strain of a questionable prosecution hanging over him.

His case is an object lesson in how politics and especially political expediency can have unintended consequences for someone who may have been proven innocent had a `normal` legal process been allowed to be followed.   I suppose it`s the injustice, the unfairness and the avoidability of it all that makes me seriously angry about this case.  And it is now all too late for those responsible to show any sign of regret.