Peer's reaction: The IRA's statement yesterday that its campaign of violence was over sparked an emotional response from one of its highest profile political victims.
Tory peer Lord Tebbit was injured - and his wife paralysed - in the attempt to wipe out Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet by blowing up Brighton's Grand Hotel in 1984. Five people died in the attack.
Lord Tebbit, who was then an MP and trade and industry secretary, said it was "too much to bear" to see terrorists rewarded.
In a reflection recorded for BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he said: "For the terrorists' victims, there's the knowledge that their lives were not wrecked by illness, accident or even personal grudge but because someone used their lives, their bodies, to bludgeon and blackmail a government to submit to their political demands.
"We, the victims, should not have to endure the sight of terrorists rewarded nor fanatics left free to urge their followers to kill their way to paradise. That is just too much to bear."
The peer said that for victims, unlike terrorists, "the slate is never wiped clean".
"Terrorists can be let out of jail, none the worse for the loss of liberty for a few years.
"But for victims the slate is never wiped clean: early release has no meaning for the victim unless it's early release into the grave from a ruined life or a body broken by the barbarous use of the bodies of the innocent to gain what the terrorist wants.
"The bereaved grieve in their thousands, at first through every waking hour. But then as time goes past the pain comes only in sharp jabs from time to time.
"'How I wish he had been here to see his daughter married' or, as the others go home to husband, wife, father, son or daughter, the victims go home to a house in darkness. 'How I wish he was still here, they will say'.
"For myself, most days I don't think about my own scars or the bits of plastic which hold me together, and the aches and pains, when they come, are what we all share in old age.
"But every morning as I awake, my wife is there beside me; still the same person as she was when we married almost 50 years ago.
"But no more can she sit up and say 'It's a lovely day: let's go for a walk' as we did across the moors with the children and the dogs. For her, pain is the ever-present companion; disability the load she never ceases to bear.
"For her, that quick shower and breakfast is a three-hour routine with a carer ... Hers is now a life of dependency: having to ask for everything from waking to the end of the day." - (PA)