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I was ten years old when the Troubles erupted in 1968. They have been the defining context which has shaped the life and experience of my own and subsequent generations. Today’s generation of ten-year-olds have no memory or experience of life during the Troubles. Those entering our secondary and grammar schools this autumn will be the first generation for whom the Troubles are a fact of history rather than lived experience.

That history is one of 3,600 lives lost, (proportionately equivalent to 130,000 in the whole UK population), 50,000 people injured, 30,000 paramilitaries who served jail sentences and 300,000 who served in the security forces. No one has been left unaffected by ‘the war’ and many carry deep wounds of personal hurt and pain.

Our ancestral voices, Irish and Ulster Scots, with their competing claims of state legitimacy, national identity and religious-cultural belonging have brought out the worst in us. All of us have been diminished by what we have thought, said and done to each other. And we have bequeathed the legacy of a society profoundly traumatised by decades of hostility and suspicion between political rivals.

My first real sense that something big was happening to destroy the innocence of childhood was when the army moved into our church halls. Thankfully, army patrols and armoured checkpoints are not now part of a ten-year-old child’s world in Northern Ireland today. Having witnessed many of the milestones in our peace process, a similar sense of something big happening overcame me on Tuesday as I stood in the Great Hall at Stormont.

As Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness descended the steps together with Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, it was difficult not to be caught up in the overwhelming sense that this was a defining moment for a new generation. After forty years, the ancestral voices of division are to fall silent or, in the words of the First Minister, “But that was yesterday, this is today, and tomorrow is tomorrow.”

He went on to say, “I believe that Northern Ireland has come to a time of peace, a time when hate will no longer rule. How good it will be to be part of a wonderful healing in our Province. Today we have begun to plant and we await the harvest.”

Those of us present in Parliament Buildings and the thousands who watched on TV news bulletins bear witness – their war is over, our war is over. The time to kill and hate, the time for war is past. Now it is time for peace – to heal and to love. As the church we need to recover the power of the first and only law of Christ which transforms people and communities – the law of love, of neighbour and enemy alike.

In bearing public witness, we who have been the generations of the Troubles must hold ourselves and our leaders to account for the peace of future generations. And in bearing witness to the peace, if there is to be healing then the time will come to bear witness to the truth. But this is today and tomorrow is tomorrow – and today is the end of the war.

David Porter