Darkley Massacre 40th Anniversary: Atrocity came amid "genocide" of Protestants right along the border says former UUP MP Jim Nicholson

The gunmen opened fire on the small wooden church building as 70 men women and children sang hymns inside. Those killed were David Wilson, Harold Browne and Victor Cunningham.

Jim Nicholson was the UUP MP for Newry and Armagh when the attack happened. He lived half way between Armagh and Keady, where he still lives today.

"I will never forget it because the RUC arrived at my home and told me I was not to leave the house," he said of the aftermath of the Darkley attack. "I was housebound for a week. The atmosphere in the area at that time - you could have cut it with a knife. I cannot find the right words to describe the sense of fear and trepidation that was in the community at that time.

"No words of mine can actually explain the suffering or the hardship that the unionist Protestant community suffered at that particular time along the border - from south Armagh, to Fermanagh and right up to Castlederg."

There are myriad cases of republican gunmen murdering isolated Protestants in their farms along the full length of the border during the Troubles. Many of the farms still lie derelict today.

"It was just an attempt to wipe the Protestant Unionist people out of the area and was nothing short of genocide," he added.

"And I have no doubt that fear was right across all the communities at the time because nobody knew where tit-for-tat reprisals would happen next."

One Saturday morning in June 1987 - four years after the Darkley Massacre - he had left home for Westminster business in Bessbrook, driven by two RUC men in an armoured car.

Then word came through that the same terror group, the INLA, had opened fire on his family.

"They took over a neighbor's house looking straight into my home and held them hostage all night. And then when my wife took off with two of the children in the car that morning, they ambushed them on the Keady Armagh Road."

Despite several shots being fired at the car his family were not injured.

He believes they were trying to kill him. But asked how the INLA did not know they were just shooting at his family when they watched him leave in a different car, he is at a loss to explain.

"There were many single people on the border who were murdered at that time, many UDR soldiers, Sir Norman Stronge in Tynan, Tullyvallen Orange Hall, Newry police station, Kingsmills and Charlie Armstrong, the chairman of Armagh Council.

"It's hard for people today to understand, especially if they lived in safe havens. But what I do say is, never again should any future generation be ever placed in the position that the unionist Protestant people in the 1980s were placed in along the border.

The people of Northern Ireland have got to decide how they are going to live together."