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The police officer murdered by dissident republicans in County Armagh will not be forgotten, mourners at his funeral have been told.

Constable Stephen Carroll, 48, was shot while on duty in Craigavon on Monday.

Thousands of people lined the streets outside St Therese Church in his hometown of Banbridge, County Down, where funeral mass was held.

The congregation applauded as he left the altar.

It carried wreaths with the messages 'brother', 'son' and 'uncle'. The coffin was draped in a Police Service of Northern Ireland flag.

In the church Constable Carroll's police cap, gloves and medals were placed on a table next to his coffin along with a Manchester United shirt.

The cortege makes its way to the church
The Catholic Bishop of Dromore, the Most Rev John McAreavey, delivered a direct message to the killers.

"You are greatly mistaken, your way of thinking is backward-looking, the people of Ireland and Britain have chosen a better way forward, the way of reconciliation and accommodation," he told the congregation.

"We are determined not to allow ourselves to be dragged back into the morass of hatred and violence."

"We certainly do not want to lose the peace. We will not lose the peace," he said.

"The word patriotism has been used in many different ways by many different people down the years. Tragically this word is one of the most abused words in the English language.

Canon Liam Stevenson

Ulster Unionist MP Lady Sylvia Hermon, whose late husband Jack was an RUC chief constable, sat next to John O'Dowd from Sinn Féin.

Speaking on Thursday, Mr Carroll's widow Kate said: "I feel now that I'm dead inside."

Addressing her husband's killers she asked them to realise that "a piece of land is a piece of land".

"At the end of the day my husband's just going to get six foot by six foot and that's all any of us are going to get," she said.

It was the first murder of a police officer in Northern Ireland since 1998, as well as the first time that a PSNI officer had been murdered by paramilitaries since the force was formed in 2001.

The Continuity IRA said it carried out the murder.

Two days before Constable Carroll's murder, two soldiers were shot dead by the Real IRA at Massereene barracks in Antrim.

Police have been granted an extension until Tuesday to continue questioning two people, a youth aged 17 and a man aged 37, about Constable Carroll's murder. BBC

Burial of the NOrth Irish police officer





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