The reopening of a payment fund for those bereaved in Northern Ireland’s troubled past has been warmly welcomed. The Bereaved Self-Directed Assistance Payments scheme provides an annual payment to a spouse or partner, parent or child of someone who was killed, in recognition of their loss. There had been disappointment when it closed to new applications in 2017. The aftermath of the IRA’s Hyde Park bomb in 1982 (PA) Many who had not heard of the fund, from across the UK and Ireland as well as Northern Ireland, felt they had been forgotten about. These included scores of widows who had been left to raise families by themselves after their husbands were killed.