It's ten years since we first heard of Robert McCartney. It's still hard to reconcile the photo of the big smiling man holding his baby son on the beach at Newcastle with the horror that unfolded on 30 January 2005 in Magennis's bar.
From his youngest years in the Short Strand, Robert was a target for loyalist thugs. Walking home on the 'wrong' side of the road at night identified you as a Catholic and you could pay with your life.
Never for a second did Robert think he was in danger as he drank in a pub full of so-called republicans just back from a Bloody Sunday march in Derry.
And it was something so small – a hand gesture about a football team that a woman took offence to – which led to the awful chain of events.
As well as a fatal stab wound to the stomach, Robert McCartney suffered a broken nose, a black eye, and extensive cuts and bruising.
He never threw one punch. Even with the blood pumping out of him, his assailants continued to beat and kick him as he lay helpless on the ground. These people wouldn't have been out of place in the Shankill Butchers.
And those who (rightly) complain about the British establishment's cover-up of Bloody Sunday, destroyed the CCTV tapes, and washed the bar in an attempt to eradicate forensic evidence.
Robert McCartney's murder is not just an indictment of a few "bad apples". Of those 70 people in the bar who gave statements to police, all said they were either in the toilet or on their mobile phones during the fight.
While the McCartney family were abused, vilified, and in two cases intimidated from their homes, the killers and their clique live at ease in republican areas. There were no pickets outside their doors.
It's not just the IRA in the dock. A police investigation which the family describe as "hopeless" and the decision to prosecute three men in connection with the murder, without adequate evidence, has left the family deeply disillusioned.
Politicians and governments cynically used the murder to pressurise Sinn Féin into supporting policing. Once that happened and the power-sharing Executive was established at Stormont, they didn't want to know.
On the 10th anniversary of his murder, let's not pretend there was ever any real commitment to 'justice for Robert McCartney'.
