Thirty-five years ago today, mid-morning on December 7, 1983, Edgar Graham, a law professor and recently elected member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, was standing outside the library at Queen’s University Belfast. He was 29 years old, the beneficiary of an Oxford education, and a rising star in the legal and political world. And that, many unionists claim, is why he was murdered.

Edgar Graham was shot six times in the head. The IRA took responsibility for his death, which, its statement as reported in the New York Times explained, was intended to provide “a salutary lesson to those loyalists who stand foursquare behind the laws and forces of oppression of the nationalist people.” Edgar Graham had certainly expressed some very forthright political opinions, which were controversial even among his fellow unionists. His emphasis on “law and order” and his support for cultivating informants was threatening to paramilitaries on both sides of the conflict, and might even have brought them together in a common cause: he had claimed, in the weeks before his death, that republicans had been conspiring with loyalist terrorists to plan for his execution.

The murder shocked the political establishment on both sides of the border even as, contemporary reports alleged, it prompted cheering in the student union. Edgar Graham was an unusual “legitimate target,” as the terminology of the conflict put it. He was a civilian, uninvolved with any paramilitary activity, who was not even a member of the Orange Order, the popular Protestant fraternity that stages marches every summer. And, like almost all of 3,500 victims of the Troubles, no-one has ever been held to account for his death.

Edgar Graham’s legacy is in many respects unremarkable. His death has never been at the center of a public debate, like the murder of his colleague, Pat Finucane, who died at the hands of loyalist paramilitaries with the collusion of security forces in 1989. The Police Service of Northern Ireland historical enquiries team, which examined evidence in relation to unsolved Troubles crimes, did not produce any new report on the circumstances of his death, despite holding information on file when it wound up in 2014. Unlike Miriam Daly, a Queen’s academic linked to the INLA who was murdered by loyalists in her home in 1980, his death is not commemorated in any of Belfast’s famous political murals. Schools in the Belfast area award public speaking prizes in his honor, and his name has been given to a teaching room in the law school in which he taught. His death warrants a passing mention in the relevant volume of his university’s history, where he shares a paragraph with Miriam Daly, though neither are included in the index. But there is not much else by way of public commemoration. Only in a foyer of the parliament buildings at Stormont does a plaque memorialize his passing, with its exhortation, from Euripides, to “Keep alive the light of justice.” Remembered by an always diminishing number of friends and colleagues, Edgar Graham’s death is like many of the thousands of unsolved, and often forgotten, troubles tragedies.

But, 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to the 30 years of violence, Edgar Graham’s death remains quietly controversial. Earlier this autumn, Michelle O’Neill, the progressive leader of Sinn Fein, gave a lecture at Queen’s that was attended by Edgar’s sister, Anne Graham, who pressed the leader of nationalism to condemn his execution. The question put O’Neill in a familiar bind, which suggests to many observers that Sinn Fein politicians cannot yet establish a critical distance from the activities of the terrorist organization with which they were once so closely identified. And so it was perhaps no surprise that O’Neill did not confirm that Edgar Graham’s killing was wrong: In the pattern that is now familiar in local political conversation, she expressed regret for his murder without being able to condemn it.

Whatever else it may signal, O’Neill’s response highlights both the potency of historical memory and the difficulty of sustaining within Northern Ireland a society based upon rights. Twenty years after the end of the Troubles, the history of the conflict continues to be weaponized, both by those who were once closely identified with the group that took responsibility for Edgar Graham’s death, by the broader community of constitutional nationalists who brought Sinn Fein to the negotiating table, and by the unionists who stood most resolutely against them. While, 35 years after the event, the leader of Sinn Fein cannot yet condemn the murder of an academic lawyer and recently elected politician, her critics among the SDLP, among the earliest champions of civil rights, and among political commentators continue to decry her party’s “re-writing of history.” And, among unionists, concern about this revisionist impulse within the local education system is now strong enough to warrant several parties making electoral commitments to stop it happening.

This action of the unionist parties may be a significant tactical error. If truth is the first casualty of war, memory may be one of the worst casualties of civil war, as David Armitage notes in his volume on that theme. For if history is part of the problem, it may also be part of the solution. In Northern Ireland, history is being re-written to favor the narratives of the most powerful political parties, and to occlude the memories of many of the victims, but it could also be re-written to take account of the expanding archival base upon which the interpretation of this period must be based, a task all the more pressing if it is to adequately address the thousands of tragedies whose stories have never properly been told. Better and more inclusive histories could underwrite progress towards the society of mutual respect that seems forever out of reach.

But maybe the first step towards a more inclusive account of the Troubles is moral, rather than intellectual. Those who remember the past must consider what they choose to remember, and what they choose to regret, as well as forget, as first steps towards more effective reconciliation. But how hard can this be? What if, in this particular instance, part of the price of the reconciliation to which everyone says they are committed is for all parties to recognize that killing lawyers and academics is wrong? If there is “no hierarchy of victims,” as O’Neill observed at an IRA commemoration in 2017, why can’t Edgar Graham’s death, like the deaths of Pat Finucane and Miriam Daly, warrant both regret and condemnation?

Twenty years after the end of the conflict, peace in Northern Ireland still comes dropping slow. There is plenty of evidence that almost everyone who lives here wants to move on from the past. As they know, only too well, it takes time, care, and patience to build a new kind of society. Lasting trust is built on thousands of insignificant gestures of goodwill as much as it is on the public scaffolding of politics and law. But there is a lot of work to be done while it remains controversial to claim that killing lawyers is wrong.

In the meantime, people of goodwill from every kind of background want to “keep alive the light of justice,” as Edgar Graham’s commemorative plaque puts it. Not many people pass that plaque these days. The parliament chamber in Stormont into which that foyer opens remains unused by politicians, as the province pushes ever further into its world-record-breaking achievement of being the jurisdiction with the longest period without a peacetime government.

In circumstances like these, it will never be easy or uncomplicated to “keep alive the light of justice.” In Northern Ireland, peace approaches cautiously, from silence and slow time. We will make better progress when our leaders can finally agree that killing lawyers is wrong.

Correction: An earlier version of this essay listed an incorrect first name for Miriam Daly. We regret the error.