Many people, rightly, are this weekend remembering the twentieth anniversary of the Enniskillen atrocity. In Northern Ireland's long Calvary, it stands out as a particularly vile war-crime, and its perpetrators -- its female leader in particular -- deserved to be hanged.

But there are some aspects of the atrocity which deserve to be remembered.

It was not alone. The IRA had conducted regular massacres from the early 1970s onwards, and the week was not long enough to give every IRA massacre its own special day.

Allow me, sir, to show you the IRA's murder-menu.

The 1972 massacre at Claudy -- six dead, scores injured -- claimed Monday: so too does the massacre -- 10 Protestants shot dead -- at White Cross on a later Monday in 1975.

Tuesday goes to the slaughter of six pensioners in Coleraine in 1973. Wednesday seems curiously unmarked by IRA massacres: an oversight, no doubt. As for Thursday, why, take your pick: the 21 killed in the IRA bombings in Birmingham, or perhaps the 10 people killed in the IRA's M62 bus-bombing in 1974.

This tasty little triumph took the lives of an entire family: father Clifford Houghton, his wife Linda, and their two children Lee (5) and Robert (2). And forgotten: all quite forgotten.

As for Friday, why, as sir will see, we are spoiled for choice. Bloody Friday (Mark One) when nine people were killed and 130 injured in a wave of IRA bombings in Belfast. Or consider that Friday in August 1979, when the IRA slaughtered 22 people in the Mullaghmore/Warrenpoint massacres. Or, if sir would care to look down the menu, we have a very tasty little massacre of 10 bandsmen in Deal on a Friday in November 1989. Or perhaps, sir might prefer the slaughter of 11 cavalrymen on Friday in July 1982? On the other hand, might I direct sir's attention to the October Friday in Brighton in 1984, four dead and scores injured.

Saturday brings us to the Harrods bomb a week before Christmas, 1987: six dead and 80 injured, and the season's greetings to you, sir. On the other hand, perhaps sir would consider Frizzell's chip shop massacre in Belfast: 10 dead on Saturday, October 23, 1993.

And as for Sunday, well the first Bloody Sunday was claimed by the 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment. Still, the IRA had later prepared its very own Special Sabbatical dish: 11 dead and scores injured, at Enniskillen, just 20 years ago. And not accidental, but entirely intended, as a simultaneous but failed bomb attack on a boys' brigade gathering nearby showed.

Now any of these could have been used as a pretext for the Irish Republic to close down the IRA, root and branch. It chose not to do so. And a largely forgotten killing three weeks after the Enniskillen shambles reveals both the problem, and the lost opportunity to tackle it.

The republican splinter group the INLA had recently kidnapped the Dublin dentist John O'Grady, and a nationwide hunt failed at first to find him as the gang carried him from safe house to safe house across the country.

For despite this being the largest manhunt in the history of the Irish state; despite the widespread revulsion at the Enniskillen massacre; and despite the knowledge that O'Hare had severed his victim's little fingers with a hammer and chisel and left them in Carlow cathedral, there were still safe houses for such people. In other words, the broader Sinn Fein community was now so barbarised that no crime was beyond its moral pale.

Finally, our security forces sprang an ambush on O'Hare in Kilkenny, injuring him but killing his unarmed companion Martin Bryan.

Rightly, there appeared to be no attempt to take either man alive. But the response to the killing of the unarmed Bryan in a carefully-laid ambush was fascinating. There was none. The plain people of Ireland were sick of the IRA.

It was if they had said: 'Let these murderous heathens be taken on, without mercy, and to hell with their self-pitying caterwauling.'

Twenty years ago today, Ireland should have woken to a new dawn, in which the IRA would be crushed. Instead, we got still further appeasement, with the Troubles lasting another nine years, and taking another EIGHT HUNDRED lives.

Previous generations of Irish nationalist leaders -- Richard Mulcahy, Kevin O'Higgins, Eamon de Valera, Sean Lemass -- knew that only ruthless measures can end an IRA campaign.

Merely using the rule of law against an armed terrorist conspiracy is not merely futile, but it is immoral: it is to condemn to death those victims of fascist republicanism whom the State has a duty to protect.

But that, disgustingly, is precisely what successive governments of this Republic allowed to happen.

And so, on this weekend of weekends, we can say of the additional 800 dead: We Do Not Remember Them.

- KEVIN MYERS