Victims of the Northern Ireland Troubles have been remembered at a moving tribute in Dublin.
The names of the 3,500 who died during the Troubles were read out at a four hour ceremony at the Dublin Unitarian Church.
The annual commemoration, now in its fourth year, took over three hours. It is the only such religious service in Ireland to remember the dead from all sides of the community.
Spokesman Andy Pollak, from the Centre for Cross Border Studies, told the Irish Times that the reading of names illustrates powerfully the terrible, random nature of death in war and civil conflict.
“All human life and death is in this mournful list,” he said.
“British soldiers, IRA volunteers, loyalist paramilitaries, Ulster policemen and women, gardai (police), part-time UDR men, prison officers, civil rights marchers and judges are remembered, alongside the innocent victims of all ages killed in cities, towns and villages across Northern Ireland, the Irish republic and Britain.”
The paper reports that the list starts alphabetically with Anthony Abbott, a soldier from Manchester shot dead by the IRA in Ardoyne in North Belfast in 1976.
It finishes with William and Letitia Younger, an elderly Protestant man and his daughter, who were beaten, stabbed and shot by intruders in their home in Ligoniel in 1980.
The list begins in 1966 with John Patrick Scullion, a Catholic storeman shot by the UVF in Belfast.
The final victim was Catholic PSNI constable Ronan Kerr who was murdered in a car bomb attack by dissidents in Omagh, Co Tyrone, last April.
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