The Irish and US Presidents, the Taoiseach and the British Prime Minister are among political leaders participating today in a radio tribute to the 3,637 people who lost their lives during the Troubles. Others in the programme include Senator George Mitchell, Mr John Hume, Mr David Trimble, and Mr Gerry Adams.
The victims are listed in the book, Lost Lives, by journalists David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton.
The RTE production is being broadcast on RTE Radio 1 and Radio Ulster at 8.30 a.m. today. In it President Clinton recalls Maura Monaghan who, at 18 months, was the youngest victim of the 29 killed in the Omagh bombing in August 1998. The child's mother and grandmother were also killed.
President Clinton says he still feels "a personal connection with this tragedy". He met many of the injured and bereaved with his wife, Hillary. "That meeting was one of the most difficult and moving experiences of our lives but I have to say it was also one of the most uplifting."
The President, Mrs McAleese, remembers John Ramsay, a Protestant shot in north Belfast in 1974, by loyalists who thought he was a Catholic. Mrs McAleese says her family knew the victim and the family of one of the men who killed him.
"Their son, our friend, became a killer of Catholics, a killer of a man he thought was a Catholic. He broke many hearts that day."
The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, remembers the loyalist car bombs that killed 33 people in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974. On the day, Mr Ahern says, he was a hospital administrator, working in a casualty department. "It is a memory that will remain with me forever," he says.
Mr Tony Blair reflects on the deaths of the three Quinn brothers who died in a loyalist arson attack in Ballymoney, Co Antrim, during the Drumcree protests of July 1998. "Reading now the account of those who heard the last desperate cries for help as the Quinn boys tried to escape the flames, the same feelings came back again and again - pity, anger, despair, but perhaps most of all the powerful conviction that there has to be a better future than this," he says.
The North's First Minister, Mr David Trimble, becomes emotional remembering the death of Frederick Anthony, a cleaner in an RUC station who was killed by an IRA car bomb in Lurgan in 1974. He also recalls how the murdered man's three-year-old daughter, Emma, was badly injured, spending nine days in a coma amid great fears that she could not survive.
"You see, she had been in the back seat just behind her father, and she was standing up holding on to his seat talking to him when the bomb went off. Her survival was close to a miracle," says Mr Trimble.
The SDLP leader, Mr John Hume, remembers the UDA gun attack on a pub in Greysteel, Co Derry, that resulted in seven deaths. He attended the funerals at a time when he was being criticised for his dialogue with Mr Gerry Adams, and recalls how a girl left him in tears.
"A young girl came up to me and put her arms around me and she said: `Mr Hume, we prayed for you around my Daddy's coffin last night. We prayed that you would succeed in the work you were doing, so that no one will ever have to suffer in the future what we have suffered'. "
Mr Gerry Adams says he found it impossible to choose a particular victim. "We can't bring back those who have died but we can make sure that it never happens again, that this island never goes through what we've gone through for the last 30 years."
