ON wasteground they found Peter's body early in The Troubles. The bullet's blast had contorted him into fierce angles, and a black garbage sack covered his head. Over the years which followed that tidiness would become a mocking nicety for the terror squads on either side, a sense of propriety which still trashed the victim but hid from the gunmen any pleading in the eyes.

Peter was the brother of my best friend at school. He was a youngster the only times I met him. But when he died people described him as among the quietest in that large rumbustious family. Their childhood had been spend in Tanzania until Peg's father returned them to their roots when he took up a post as surgeon in one of Belfast's major hospitals. In due course Peter opted for medicine too, becoming a student at Queen's University.

He was a bit of a folksinger at a time when that gave you the whiff of celebrity, but he had no history of violence, no political activism beyond the Dylanesque incantations of a nasal balladeer. When the discovery happened, the authorities told his family that this wasn't a straight forward assassination, and you guessed, then, that Peter had been tortured. But although the murderers got the son, it was really the father they had in their sights.

Paramilitaries, whatever their allegiance, tend to need surgeons faster than the rest of us, so it makes sense not to destroy the hand which some day might be the only skilled one to save them. Ambush the son, however, the daughter, mother, sister, wife, and you give bigotry a grotesque perfection.

Why had it happened to this family?

Peter's father was a cliff of a man whose black eyebrows peaked and dipped with restless agitation. Perhaps because of his colonial days he was impatient with diplomacy. Ignoring cautions that he be discrete and keep his observations to himself, he went public to support claims against the British authorities about physical and mental torture of Republican internees held without trial in Long Kesh.

Not only that, he presented evidence to the International Court of Human Rights, and returned his war medals won when he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the Second World War.

The more the father campaigned, the more he was secured in the minds of Loyalism's extremists as a Fenian collaborator. Among the wild men the message went out to seek reprisal, and so they kidnapped Peter one December night, knowing that to slay a child, however much an adult, turns life into a form of death for the parent. This is how it was for my friend's dad.

Some years later a heart attack killed him, but long before that he had the downward cast of a man collapsing inwards from emotional ruin.

Are we right to bring up such agonising stories once again? God knows, there is no shortage of grieving litanies from the past 25 years, yet it has taken until this to gain public acknowledgement that the sufferings of victims must not be forgotten. The recent Bloomfield Report has powerfully acknowledged this and the Government has responded quickly by appointing Adam Ingram as Minister for Victims to co-ordinate support efforts which must include substantial compensation. But in Sir Kenneth Bloomfield's view the time is not yet right for

Ann McCann, of the Women's Coalition, is among those who believe a commission would only intensify families' sorrow. Twenty-six years ago next Wednesday her brother was one of the first to be killed in tit-for-tat sectarianism. He had no political or paramilitary affiliations and no-one has ever been charged with his murder. ''It was only yards from our home. He was stepping from a taxi after a night out and we were only told the barest details.

''For all I know those gunmen themselves may be dead. Or, like many murderers in Northern Ireland they might never have seen the inside of a jail. If we were to learn now who did it, well you just couldn't let it be without feeling justice must be served. It would only make everything so much worse.''

So, there is a genuine dilemma: which must come first - reconciliation or truth? The Sinn Fein President, Gerry Adams, has said that he will try to persuade the IRA to reveal the whereabouts of Northern Ireland's ''disappeared ones'', those abducted, killed and secretly buried, and he urges loyalists to put similar pressure on their paramilitaries.

But the very worst result would be for some sort of league table of bereavement which would drive the two communities further apart. Somewhere along the line though, the long-term grief of innocent people became an embarrassment to be ignored by Northern Ireland's establishment politicians because it so obviously demonstrated their failure.

But at the grassroots, tragedy itself occasionally works small miracles. There is no neutral zone more terrible than the waiting area of a hospital, a prison or a morgue, and there ordinary protestants and catholics have sometimes found themselves thrown together, united by anguish at the dreadful waste of it all - a quarter of a century of raw, convulsing loss.