A ban on prosecution of past Northern Ireland killings causes new divisions

Pvt. Tony Harrison was deployed in Northern Ireland, between 1989 through 1991, when he was shot by the IRA.

The Seaman family

BELFAST, Northern Ireland, and LONDON — It was a warm June night in 1991 when a phone call came that would change Martha Seaman’s life forever.

It was her son’s fiancée, and she was crying.

“That was the beginning of a lifetime of misery,” Seaman, now 80, says. “To this day, I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.”

Seaman’s first-born, Tony Harrison, was a 21-year-old British paratrooper stationed in Belfast at the height of the so-called “Troubles” — fighting between Roman Catholics and Protestants.

What began in 1969 as a peacekeeping mission to maintain law and order evolved into the British Army’s longest-ever deployment, involving a quarter-million troops over four decades. More than 3,500 soldiers, rival paramilitaries and civilians were killed.

That night, Harrison became one of the victims.

On June 19, 1991, he was off-duty, watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air on TV with his fiancée on her couch in East Belfast, a Protestant area, when two masked gunmen stormed in. They shot Harrison five times in the back. He died instantly.

“He’s been gone now for 32 years — 32 years of fear, misery and hard grief,” Seaman tells NPR at the East London home of her surviving son, Andrew Seaman, 45.

They spread photos of Pvt. Harrison across the kitchen table. In one, 17-year-old Harrison poses in camouflage, a slightly too-big helmet askew on his head. In another, he laughs with a friend.

The military told Martha Seaman her son’s killers were members of the Irish Republican Army or IRA, a…