Enniskillen bomb: '13th victim' killed in revenge attack

By Siobhan Fenton

Adam Lambert was just 20 years old when he was shot dead in Belfast by loyalist paramilitaries the day after the Enniskillen bombing.

The murder was intended to be a revenge attack on a Catholic, but in a case of mistaken identity the young Protestant, who was on work experience at the time, was killed instead.

His mother Ivy Lambert, 85, explains that her son became "the 13th victim" of Enniskillen, although often forgotten in the aftermath of the bomb.

She says: "Adam was sort of the forgotten one. The Enniskillen bomb was such a big thing and he was just a single person, so people thought that he had become forgotten in the middle of it all. I don't want him to be forgotten, I want him to be kept alive in peoples' memory."

Mrs Lambert explains: "It's been 30 years now - such a very long time. Sometimes, I think did we ever have Adam? And at other times I feel he's very near."

Her son was a handsome and popular man, studying building science, and well-liked by all who met him, Mrs Lambert says.

A portrait of him hangs above the fireplace at the family home in Ballygawley, Co Tyrone, where Mrs Lambert still lives, showing a confident young man with a mop of dark hair and a broad grin.

"He was an absolutely superb young man," she says. "He would have been a great member of society. He was meticulous about everything, particularly in his studies - he never missed a lecture."

Reflecting on the day she heard the news of her son's murder in the Highfield estate in west Belfast, she says: "I never thought when I heard the news about the Enniskillen bomb on the Sunday that I'd be hearing the same thing about my own child the next day."

However, she says she harbours no bitterness or anger about his death: "It's a long, long time ago now. People say time isn't a great healer but I think it is. Thankfully, we never had vitriol or anger.

"I suppose we accepted it, we thought that's the way Adam was supposed to go. A lot of people will think that's a silly way of looking at it. But I thought that Adam has done as much in 20 years as many people do in a lifetime. He shed a lot of love and light around and he was very well liked."