I was seven years old at the time of that bombing. I still remember waking up and hearing about it. The tro s, as they were called in northern island, felt personal to me. What stands out to me now is how normal it all was. It seemed like new just in was often about the latest i r a bomb. Long before terrorism was a term widely used in the united states, we had known it and had lived with it. And there was this sense, i never remember spoken exactly, that this would never be resolved. John major came into office determined to do something about it. He created a set of principles that could underpin a full scale peace settlement for Northern Ireland