On the day my son Tim was fatally injured by an IRA bomb, he had gone into town with a couple of friends to buy a pair of Everton football shorts. It was March 20, 1993, and Tim - 12 years old and football mad - had left our home in Warrington for a day of innocent fun with his friends, just as on Monday evening the girls and boys at the Manchester Arena were dropped off by their parents for an evening of singing and dancing, unaware that a couple of hours later they would be fighting for their lives in hospital.

Twenty-four years after Tim’s death, it is still unthinkable that he didn’t come home that day.

To kill a child - let alone multiple children and adults - is, quite simply, the most barbaric and callous act imaginable. And the devastation, the subsequent ripple effect it creates in every family who suffers this terrible loss is monumental.