The past two years have been the toughest of my career as a crime journalist in Northern Ireland. I've been abused, harassed, and targeted by Loyalist paramilitaries who have not only threatened to shoot me dead, but to rape one of my children. When my name was spray-painted on walls alongside gun crosshairs, I sat back and asked myself, how did it get to this? How have terrorist thugs, supposedly under the watch of police, been able to succeed with such ease in putting a target on my back?
The answer is disturbingly simple; they've been allowed to.
Impunity sends a clear message to journalists: threats against you are not a priority to us and a separate message to those threatening them: you can continue because we will not hold you to account. Impunity is a word that is synonymous with Northern Ireland's troubled past. A legacy of unsolved killings mixed with protected state agents means that many of those who lost loved ones during the darkest days of the conflict will never get the truth and justice they deserve. Twenty-three years on from the Good Friday Agreement, divided communities ruled by Republican and Loyalist crime gangs still exist. Those paramilitaries have claimed the lives of two journalists since that very same peace deal was signed.
