Three Catholic civilians; one member of the Provisional IRA, working a construction job like the others. They were neighbours and relatives, doing the kind of work that builds villages - putting kitchens into rented houses, fixing roofs, hanging doors. They had families waiting at home for them that evening. The UDA gunmen described their targets as "an IRA member and his accomplices," a framing that conveniently classified three civilians as legitimate by association. The four families who buried them did not see the deaths in those terms. Northern Ireland is small. The same streets that mourned in Castlerock had mourned for generations of victims from both communities. The wounds are not abstract here.

The two gunmen stepped out of their hijacked van wearing balaclavas, combat jackets, and the impersonal anonymity that paramilitaries of all stripes used to attempt invisibility. One stood directly in front of the workers' van and fired through the windscreen. Glass exploded. One of the men fell out of the passenger door and the gunman continued shooting at him on the ground. Gerard McEldowney, sitting in the front, did the only thing he could think of - he scrambled over the seat into the back of the van, lay between the toolboxes, and waited. A handgun round struck his thigh. The metal boxes absorbed others. The whole attack lasted perhaps a minute. When the gunmen drove away, four men were dead or dying.

Investigators eventually identified Torrens Knight, a Coleraine man, as one of the killers. Knight would go on to participate in the Greysteel massacre seven months later - the UDA attack on the Rising Sun bar that killed eight Catholic civilians on Halloween night, 1993. For Greysteel, Knight received eight life sentences. For Castlerock, he received four more. He served seven years in the Maze Prison, then was released in 2000 under the general release provisions of the Belfast Agreement - a peace settlement that depended, in part, on letting paramilitary prisoners out as a confidence-building measure. The decision still divides victims' families more than two decades later. The Belfast Agreement ended the violence. It did not end the grief.

Castlerock is a seaside village - basalt cliffs to the east, a long strand of golden sand, the Mussenden Temple perched dramatically on the bluff above. Tourists come for the golf links, the Antrim coast scenery, the easy escape from Belfast or Derry on summer weekends. The village had a population of 1,155 at the 2021 census. Most visitors do not know about the murders. The killings happened in a housing estate on the village's edge - not visible from the main road, not on any walking tour, not commemorated by a plaque you would notice. The Castlerock killings were, in the official phrase, an aberration in an otherwise quiet village. That phrasing comforts the visitor. It does not comfort the families who lost fathers, brothers, husbands on a Thursday morning in March.

The four men are remembered each year on the anniversary by family and community. The site of the attack is now indistinguishable from the surrounding street. Children who were born after 1993 walk to school here. This is how Northern Ireland holds its terrible memories - not only in monuments to the dead but in the resolutely ordinary lives that survivors and descendants have made afterwards. McEldowney lived. He had been shielded by toolboxes. He went home to his family. He carried the wound and the memory for the rest of his life, as his community continues to do, as so many communities across these counties continue to do.